Starrise_at_Corrivale

Chapter Two
THE MEAT-STUFFED rolls Gabriel liberated from the galley vanished down him almost without his noticing after he took them back to his quarters. As a lieutenant, Gabriel had the privilege of his own quarters, if one counted such a small cubicle as a privilege. Once fed, he got started on the last stint of his scheduled reading, the last few days' worth of transcripts. He had had them printed, since he had to keep referring back and forth to issues handled or not handled earlier in order to tell what was going on, and the little screen on the desk built into the wall of his small bare cubby was simply not equal to the task of so much display-at least not without giving him a blinding headache from trying to read words scaled down so small. The spread-out paper almost made a second blanket for his bunk when he folded it down from between the cabinets built into the walls. Pieces of this messy "blanket" kept falling down onto the hard dark carpet on the floor. The print on the glossy paper looked neat enough, but the words were eloquent of much death, much pain, a lot of blood spilled.
The soft hoot of the alarm went off before he was expecting it. Ten minutes until the afternoon briefing session. Gabriel got up hurriedly, stacked the papers up neatly on his desk and folded his bunk away again. Just before going out, he straightened his uniform and glanced in the mirror. The glint of the room light on the bar: green, white, blue, epsilon-Oh, stop it, he told himself, pulled his tunic down straight, and headed out, touching the door panel so that it locked behind him.
As he got out of the lift on the deck below bridge level, the deck where the main briefing room was located, he could catch a faint buzz of conversation coming from ahead of him, the sound of other people heading that way. There was more to it than that, though. There was an edge of excitement there, a change that he'd heard in the commonplace daily murmur of the ship's complement before. It was the edge that meant something was about to happen. Action … of the only kind that mattered to a marine. Gabriel's hair stood up on the back of his neck at that sound, and he actually had to stop briefly in the hall and calm himself as he felt his pulse pick up. It was not time for racing pulses and adrenaline, not just yet. But maybe soon.
It took him only a couple of minutes more to get to the briefing room, a rather plusher kind of room than the wardroom or other marine quarters. The room was windowless, and the walls were bare of any ornament, but soft lighting shone down from around the ceiling, glowing on a long gleaming black table. The room was already three-quarters full of Star Force personnel, as well as other marines-his immediate superior Captain Urrizh, and her superior Major T'teka. The short colonel was missing, and T'teka was probably standing in for him. That started Gabriel wondering a little. It was not like Arends to miss one of these briefings. Is something up? Gabriel wondered.
Gabriel sat down in an empty chair near the end of the table where he knew the ambassador would be by preference. Not too near, though, since his main business today (besides noting whatever strategy she had planned) was to notice others' reactions. He was distracted from this for the moment as the ambassador herself came in. Everyone stood. Theoretically, of course, she outranked everyone here, even the commanding officer of the ship. But Gabriel suspected that the gesture had more to do simply with the way Lauren Delvecchio carried herself. Someone unfamiliar with anything but the dry facts of her career record might have thought that a woman of a hundred and thirty-three might look dangerously ordinary in the plain gray uniform of her service. But that, and the white hair braided up tight, and the lean little body with the fierce sharp little eyes that now glanced around her, all joined to communicate a dangerous sense of control and power. She looked like a sword, even to the slight curve of her back, which the surgery after her flitter crash had not been able to correct. Seeing her in full official array rather than in civvies and leaning back behind an empty desk, Gabriel once more felt very sorry for the governments of Phorcys and Ino. Things were plainly about to start moving somehow, and they would never know what had hit them.
She acknowledged the standing Star Force and marine crew. "Please, sit," she said. "We have a lot to cover."
They did. People sorted themselves out into the few remaining seats, including a latecomer who plunked herself down on Gabriel's left, nearer the ambassador. Delvecchio sat down and put a printout and a couple of datacarts down on the table before her, dropping one on the "read" plate for the projection system.
"I want to thank all you ladies and gentlemen for joining me," Delvecchio said. "Such attention to ongoing business is appreciated, since a chance look or word from any of us could have the potential to influence what's going to happen here tomorrow afternoon. Particularly, I want to welcome those of you from Callirhoe and Wanasha who made starfall in this system such a short time ago and still have gone out of your way to be here on time. Shall we get started?"
She reached out and touched the read plate before her. Above the middle of the table a holographic schematic appeared, not to scale: the bright spark of the sun Thalaassa at the center of its system, and highlighted, the third and fourth planets out in its six planet system, Phorcys and Ino. Gabriel leaned over toward the blonde-haired shape in the chair next to his and said, very softly, "Captain, do you think we can sneak out and come back in later? We've already seen this part." Captain Elinke Dareyev barely moved her eyes sideways to meet his, a slightly wicked look, and said almost inaudibly and nearly without moving her mouth, "One of these days I'm going to remember to bring a discipline stick in here with me." But the side of her mouth nearest him curved up just slightly as she turned to face the ambassador more fully.
Gabriel erased his own grin and did his best to look attentive, but his attention was still mostly on the woman sitting beside him. They met for the first time the week after Gabriel had been assigned to Falada, a bit more than a year ago, as just one more of the standard coterie of Concord Marines put aboard diplomatic vessels to assist in missions that were deemed likely to require a show of force. The Captain's Mess at which they had all been introduced to her had been one of the usual slightly ritualistic, formal affairs that shipside protocol required "to introduce the new officers to one another": full mess dress, tea-party manners, everything very much on the up and up… for the time being. No matter how stiff the manners were, a lot of sizing up happened at such functions. Instant likes or dislikes were formed, and afterward the word got around as to who was likely to be all right to work with and who was likely to be a pain.
Gabriel would have normally classed Elinke Dareyev as "pain" at first sight. She was not merely good– looking, but downright beautiful. Her features were very chiseled and perfect, the eyes a wonderful and peculiar blue-green that nonetheless could not distract from the proud angle at which Elinke's head was carried. And the way she seemed to look coolly and graciously down at you even though you were half a meter taller than she never left anyone any room for doubt as to who was in charge of her ship. The overall effect was that of a petite ice maiden who had stumbled into Star Force and made good. Not stumbled, as it happened. The supreme self-confidence with which she bore herself was a symptom of three generations of space service or Star Force on her mother's side of the family. Practically her first words to Gabriel had been "Yes those Dareyevs"-actually a remark made to Hal as Gabriel came up beside him, the words drawled rather genteelly over the rim of a tiny glass of something clear and deadly looking. But from the sidelong look she had given him, the shot had been intended as much to go over Gabriel's bow as over Hal's. Hal had backed off after a few completely unconvincing pleasantries, but Gabriel had stayed, waiting for a particular reaction. And when Captain Dareyev had asked him what his secondment was-all the marines aboard had a secondary duty assignment, something to "keep them busy" improving themselves and their career prospects while they were not attending to fitness issues– and when he had said, very offhandedly, "Security," Gabriel had seen what he had wanted to see: those blue-green eyes looking, just for a flash, intent rather than politely bored. Dareyev had covered the reaction up immediately, as she would have been bound to do, but she took leave of him for the next group of marines with a little more interest than the situation absolutely required. When the two of them had met again in the joint-use wardroom a couple of weeks later, accidentally as it seemed, there had been considerably more conversation. It had started out as business, a conversation that would have had to happen sooner rather than later: where one of the Intelligence officers assigned to her ship is involved, a captain must routinely have enough contact with him to be sure she trusts what he's up to and his way of working-to let her own intuition warn her of any agendas that might conflict with her ship's present business or other business yet to come among the stellar nations to which marines may routinely be deployed. Captain Dareyev had grilled Gabriel thoroughly. He could hardly remember when anyone had more casually or vigorously wrung him dry. Yet all through the interrogation, he received a constantly recurring sense of approval. By the end of the grilling, when they had moved from official to casual conversation, she was "Elinke," and he was "Gabe," and the friendship was fast already. It was one of the stranger things about shipboard life, the way that seemingly accidental scheduling and career moves could throw you together with people whom you either utterly detested, or whom it seemed you had been waiting to meet all your life. People with whom you fell in effortlessly, as if picking up a conversation that you had broken off a few hours or days ago– when you had never met the person before. That this should have happened between a first lieutenant of the Concord Marines and a Star Force captain was bizarre and amusing, but that was all. It continued to be a source of amusement to both of them as the ensuing weeks of the cruise passed by and Falada went on about her business. There had been gossip about it, of course, but that was all it was. Elinke had a lover, crazy young Lemke David in Navigation, and no matter how beautiful Elinke was, Gabriel would never have considered trying to cut in. The two of them were too perfect together, Lem's cheerful lunacy balanced perfectly by Elinke's ironic and self-conscious cool. But even so, there were other reasons not to meddle. Elinke in friendly mode was one thing. Elinke offended would simply turn around suddenly, smile at you, and walk off, and you would find yourself clutching a bloody stump and wondering what had happened. Gabriel sighed and wrenched his attention back where it belonged, even though much of the present discussion was old news to him.
". . . Thalaassa," the ambassador was saying, "which is the system primary, is unremarkable, an F2. Overtly, the two inner planets are equally unremarkable. Ino, as you can see from the schematic, is the innermost of the two. It holds a much more favorable position climactically, with median temperatures within the subtropical spread. Phorcys, in the next orbit out, is colder, but not too much so. Its distance is balanced by a very benign axial tilt of 1.3 degrees, which evens out the seasonal differences considerably and generally improves the climactic picture. The other two planets in the system are worthless for colonization-either 'light' bodies that couldn't hold their atmospheres, or in the case of the heavier worlds, too cold.
"These two worlds were settled by a single colonization effort in 2280. There was a problem when they got here, in that not everyone was going to be able to settle on the choicer of the two planets. The colonization contract stated that the colonists must divide equally-between the two 'target' planets, and should divide other system resources equally between them." "Uh oh," someone said from the back of the room.
"Exactly," said Delvecchio, with an expression like that of a tired mother hearing the kids getting ready to start an old familiar fight. "Out in the Verge, policing such an argument was hardly going to be a simple or routine matter if both parties involved did not show good faith. In this case, both sides not only immediately started to show bad faith, but each automatically presumed it in the other side. An ugly situation. The actual business of settlement, of who went to which planet, was finally decided by lottery– but the great majority of the people who wound up settling Phorcys felt that they had been cheated. Opinion divided widely on exactly by whom. The people who wound up on Ino, the Company with whom they contracted, some other unknown force-all were blamed at one point or another. You'll understand that this kind of thing gives conspiracy theories fertile soil in which to flourish. And they did. Tensions built, and either no one in a position to intervene noticed the way things were going, or the problem was deprioritized in error. But the result was that within twenty years of colonization, the two planets were at war. It started small-raids and skirmishes were all either side could afford while they were building up their respective industrial bases. But soon enough they could afford to do better, as they started manufacturing their own system craft. Both of them had their eyes on an additional prize." She pointed at the hologram, indicating the fifth planet out in the system. "This is Eraklion. It doesn't look like much: small, light gravity, unsuitable for colonization at this distance from the primary because of the temperature and the reducing atmosphere. But what it does have in plenty are fissionables and metal ores, both light and heavy. This planet is a prize for the planet that controls it, and Phorcys and Ino have been fighting over it for well over a hundred years. They have not yet damaged each other's planets
too severely, but the conflict has been escalating in that direction. Neither side has been willing to use anything more dangerous than conventional weapons… yet. But that may change soon if we don't succeed in getting them to make an accommodation. Populations may suffer. And leaving aside the not inconsiderable questions of human suffering and death if the war between these worlds breaks out in earnest, if that does happen, and they wipe each other out, a hundred years' worth of not unsuccessful colonization of this system will be lost."
She looked around at the slightly troubled faces around her. "Ladies and gentlemen," she said, "you must not mistake my meaning. The death of one child on Phorcys or Ino is one death too many for me. There have been enough such deaths in the past. It must stop. But as representatives of the Galactic Concord, we have other responsibilities as well: to the long view, to the ongoing history and development of the Verge. This part of space has had a difficult and terrible recent history. Every star system that is colonized successfully and stays that way helps every other that comes after it. Each single system exerts on all others in its area a civilizing influence that we cannot afford to ignore. The loss of one system spreads an influence too, a dark one. The ripples of unease and fear spread out, affecting worlds and relationships many light-years away, shaking the stellar nations themselves in time. There are enough things going on in this part of space that we do not now understand and may not for many years . . . things that desperately need investigation." For a moment she looked unusually somber: Gabriel found himself, not for the first time, wondering what she was thinking about. "But every system that succeeds out here in the Verge brings us closer to the kind of stability that will lead to increased understanding of the forces moving in these spaces. In the long term, we must come to understand . . . and immediate as they may seem to us, the life-and-death motives of the moment must be held and examined in the larger context before we act."
The room was very quiet. "So," Delvecchio said, "the first part of this mission, as those of you who have sat in on these briefings before know, has been taken up mostly with fact-finding. My representatives and I have spent considerable amounts of time on both Phorcys and Ino and more time than any of us wanted on Eraklion. We then started the second phase of the operation, which was to bring the disagreeing parties together." A small sound that might have been a groan, suppressed, came from one of her assistants down the length of the table. "This," said Delvecchio, "was about as easy as taking the sunglasses away from a sesheyan. These people hate each other with a pure intensity that bids fair to take your breath away."
"I take it," said one of Falada's Star Force officers, "that there was no chance to do a standard 'detoxification' period on the negotiating teams."
Delvecchio laughed ruefully. "How do you detoxify pure poison? No, I'm afraid not. If we had ten or twenty years to spare, we could start such a program and start getting each planet's people used to the idea that the others are human. But there's no time for that. The arms situation has deteriorated much too far. We have had to offer extensive economic incentives just to get their attention." Looks were exchanged around the table. Gabriel looked wry at the ambassador's expression. "The carrot and the stick, as they used to say," Delvecchio said. "We've had no choice. If this effort fails, we will have to fall back on much more robust measures. And I would prefer the lesser form of failure, however inelegant it is, to the greater."
She raised her eyebrows and looked resigned. "There have been numerous false starts. At first, just after the two sides invited us in, it was plain that they intended no rapprochement with each other at all. They wanted us to come along and make them nice trade and support offers, and then they would possibly
consider beginning to talk to each other. Well, they didn't get very far with that, and the Concord was quite prepared to just drop the whole matter at that point. Yet even the news that we had responded at all to their initial overtures heated their local economy up so substantially that they weren't able to simply let us turn their backs on them. They had to offer us something so that we would stay around and talk some more."
"And lure in more investment from the stellar nations," a young male Star Force officer down the table said.
"Oh yes," said the ambassador. "Notice was taken immediately, as you might imagine. This system is only a starfall from Corrivale, very convenient indeed to other trade traffic in the Verge. Numerous commercial concerns started to become interested in metals and fissionables mined on Eraklion. But not too interested, mind you, since after all the system is at war, and in wartime, you can't guarantee a steady 'cargo chain.' Both worlds knew that something had to be seen to be done first." Delvecchio smiled. "So the formal negotiations began three years ago. The two planets declared a truce for the period of negotiation, because naturally they couldn't be shooting at each other while Concord ships were in the neighborhood. There might have been an accident. And naturally some further investment started to come in as the situation stabilized somewhat. Nearly all the politicians and the business conglomerates on both planets were very pleased by this. The 'peace dividend'…" "The carrot," said Captain Dareyev.
"Another carrot, yes," said Ambassador Delvecchio. "Nice, wasn't it, that it seemed to come from somewhere besides us? But then came the stick. The negotiations themselves. And there the representatives dug in their heels and made it plain they could never deal with one another, never give in to one another's demands."
"You'd think that after such a long time they'd be willing to compromise a little, for the sake of all the benefits that would follow," said another of the Star Force commanders down the table. "Well, for one thing," Delvecchio said, "compromise isn't a word we could ever have used in a negotiation like this. To people arguing over territory or economic advantage, the word 'compromise' coming from a third party is code for 'We're going to help the other side get the better of you.' You can try to produce the symptoms of compromise: a settlement in which each of the participating parties goes away secretly feeling that they've given up too much and the other side has given up hardly anything. But the word itself must never be mentioned. Nor must you allow any situation to arise in which one side starts looking too satisfied. The other side will immediately suspect betrayal-or even worse, that the side opposite is going to get more of what it wants than your own side might. In these long hate cases, that's tantamount to winning. There must never be a winner in a negotiation. Or at least, there must never be a perception that there is a winner on either side."
Major T'teka was shaking his slender dark head. "Ambassador, their behavior simply doesn't seem rational."
She smiled, a thin tired look. "Of course not, Major. If they were being rational about this, any of them, we wouldn't have had to come Space knows how many starfalls and half a million kilometers past that to stop this old war. If you treat the various sides in a given negotiation as essentially crazy as bedbugs, you'll do a lot better… and this one is no different."
Captain Dareyev blinked at that. "Excuse me, Ambassador, but what's a bedbug?"
Delvecchio put her eyebrows up then laughed. "You know, I have no idea! It's something my mother
used to say. I assume it's some kind of bug that gets in bed with you, a nasty enough prospect. Makes me itch just thinking of it. At any rate," Delvecchio said, "matters have been deteriorating over the last six months. Various power blocs in the governments of both planets have been pressing for either quick results, in terms of a massive investment package from outside-the-Verge interests, or a walkout and the end of the negotiations, followed by an immediate return to war." "Old habits," Gabriel said softly, "die hard."
"Yes," the ambassador said. "And planetary elections are due shortly on Ino. The politicians there are quite aware of the galvanizing effect of a good war on the populace. They intend to use this to consolidate their own position and then come back to the negotiating table stronger than the other side." She looked wry. "At the same time, they are aware that if they break the present truce or if I catch them stalling, I will dissolve the negotiations, leave, and tell the Concord Administrator that this particular disagreement is to be classified as 'intractable' with further intervention to be attempted no sooner than seventy-five years from now."
The faces around the table went very quiet. "You mean, after everyone presently negotiating is dead," said Gabriel.
"That is language that must not leave this room," Delvecchio said. "But you're correct. If war breaks out, there will be no action except to keep it quarantined here. If the two parties wish to continue in that vein, they will be allowed to do so, and in seventy-five years my distant successor will come back and try again with the next generation. The rest of the Verge will have gone ahead with its own military and economic development, of course, with the Concord's assistance, and Phorcys and Ino will not have. You may imagine the results. I assure you, the delegations will have been doing so. That is, if the more intelligent members of the delegations have gotten a whiff of the Concord's intentions." "Which you will have seen to it that they have," Captain Dareyev said.
Delvecchio threw her an expression of utter innocence. "Well," she said, "in a roundabout sort of way. In our non-joint sessions four days ago, I let each side know that I had been authorized to make them both offers that far surpassed earlier levels of assistance that had been mooted. Both sides were amazed and understandably suspicious as to why this had happened just now. Neither of them knew, nor was I about to tell them, that I had been authorized to make offers at these levels nearly a year ago. At that time, though, had I made such offers, they would have either been too easily accepted with no promise of change forthcoming, or they would have been rejected in a bid to improve either party's negotiating position.
"Now both parties have gone off with the new offers in hand. Many members of both governments have turned right around in their skins and are hot to accept these offers, even though it means much closer cooperation with the other side than they would normally ever have been willing to admit. But both negotiating teams, for differing sets of largely personal reasons, are intent on rejecting the offers. Their problem is that the offer is too good to reject. The pressure on both planets for acceptance has been rising. If I have judged the situation correctly, each side will arrive here tomorrow with the covert intention of sabotaging not the other side's deal, but its own-by revelation of elements of improper behavior, or behavior that can be construed as improper, from the side hostile to them. This then will give them an excuse to cry 'bad faith' and break off negotiations. And then, in the fullness of time, they will go back to war."
Someone down the table swore under her breath. Someone else said, "Ambassador, don't they even care about their own people?"
"Oh, absolutely they do," Delvecchio said dryly. "They care about them enough to see them dead rather
than allow them to betray their principles. Their masters' principles, at least." An uncomfortable silence fell all around. "No matter," Ambassador Delvecchio said. "If what I have planned works out, none of this will come to pass. And if it does, it won't be for lack of our trying to stop them. Here is the order of business." She touched the table again. The holographs vanished, to be replaced by a scrolling list of political points to be handled.
Gabriel leaned over and said to Captain Dareyev, "What are the odds at the moment?"
Elinke gave him one of those sidelong, potential-bloody-stump looks. "Lieutenant," she said under her
breath, "you know regulations strictly forbid betting of any kind aboard ship."
"I heard seven to four against the ambassador last night."
Elinke made a very demure and nearly inaudible snort down her perfect nose. "If you were such an idiot as to lay money down before the odds lengthened," she breathed, not taking her eyes off the text scrolling up into the air from the tabletop, "I'd gladly take it off you, and then chuck you into stir. It was nine to five against after breakfast, which you would doubtless know if you had been there. You need to stop skiving off. People are beginning to notice. Not officially yet, lucky for you. Now pay attention." Gabriel did, though not entirely to the text. He had read it all last night, anyway. "Here," Delvecchio was saying, indicating one subsection of the text. "Here is what I'm counting on to set it off. Rallet, the head of the Phorcyn delegation, is furious about the potential Eraklion heavy metal allotments. He thinks they give Ino much too much potential to get their breeder program into high production-especially the secret one, the 'dirty breeder' that neither we or Phorcys are supposed to know about. So Rallet will blow the secret program's cover. On the Inoan side, once this happens, their own senior negotiator, ErDaishan, will riposte by informing us of Phorcys's sabotage and destruction of the Eraklian open-cast heavy metal workings at Ordinen." She shot a quick glance at Elinke.
Captain Dareyev nodded, just once. "Which has been successfully averted," Delvecchio said. "And without loss of life– congratulations, Captain, and please pass the congratulations to Captain Devereaux on Callirhoe. The Phorcyn delegation is presently in a state of shock. They will be looking for some other way to respond, but they won't be able to find anything in time, by my reckoning. And I shall remove the possibility of any such intervention by confronting them with the information about both these matters, immediately, up front. Both sets of actions are in direct contravention to both parties' agreements with us as 'honest brokers,' and that contravention will derail the negotiation process immediately without either the Phorcyn or Inoan delegations gaining the pleasure or the political advantage of having caused it themselves. Instead they will have mutually pulled the roof right down on their own heads, and they will beg us to get them out of the situation." Delvecchio smiled, ever so gently. "And, of course, we will."
There was a somewhat breathless silence. Finally Commander T'teka said, "Ambassador, how do you find all these things out?"
She looked very calm. "I have my sources," Delvecchio said, "and it might surprise you where they are. 'Discovery' on that can wait a few years-at least until the people involved are out of office-or it otherwise doesn't matter any more. What matters now is that tomorrow afternoon the Inoan and Phorcyn delegations will arrive here prepared to destroy these talks. They will instead find themselves engaging in what will be the first of many unpleasant but useful rapprochements: a genuine agreement, a treaty, to which they are both going to have to sign their names. It will take most of the day and the night. There will be a lot of noise. There may be violence." "Not on my ship," said Captain Dareyev.

"Attempted violence, I should say," said the ambassador, nodding at the captain in courteous acknowledgment. "But neither side will be willing to leave without bringing some kind of resolution about because neither trusts the other as far as any of them can spit. Trust." She looked rueful. "It will be decades before we see that from these people. But a settlement, yes, by quite late tomorrow night, I'd say. And if not, we return the delegations, break orbit, and make starfall back to Corrivale where reports will be filed for the various authorities involved, and where informal quarantine will be invoked on the Thalaassa system. After that . . ." she shrugged. "Further business will be in the hands of the local Concord Administrator. Any questions?"
Falada's protocol chief, Lieutenant Ferdinand, had some queries about the setup of the formal meeting room for the next day, which Delvecchio handled. Then she looked down the table again and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your help. I know you will all do your best to forward this process without revealing any details to non-cleared personnel." "Especially the negotiating teams," said Captain Dareyev.
Delvecchio gave her a particularly dry smile. "Especially. They will be brought to different docking bays, as usual, and all precautions should be taken to have them avoid seeing one another even at a distance until they actually enter the meeting room. All right? Then thank you, all. And wish us luck." All stood as the Ambassador did. Slowly people began to head out. Elinke, standing up and stretching, looked around her casually, then glanced over at Gabriel and said, very softly, "Fourteen to one, at best." "Think so?" Gabriel said and gave her what was meant to be a noncommittal look. She flashed him a grin and left, heading back up to her Bridge. Gabriel let the room empty in front of him, then drifted up to Delvecchio. She looked at him, still wearing that dry smile. "Disappointed?" she said. "You'd really like it if the warring parties turned on us, wouldn't you?" "I'm a marine," Gabriel said. "Whichever answer I give you in this context could be the wrong one. But-" "Don't be concerned," the ambassador said. "I understand you. But I don't think we have to worry about them threatening us. There are much worse problems to avoid."
Gabriel nodded. After a moment, he said, "Do you really think you can pull all this off?" "Oh, I know I can," Delvecchio said, looking down at the paperwork and the datacarts. "My part of it, anyway. Everything now rests with the two negotiating teams. As long as human nature doesn't change before tomorrow afternoon, and they don't stop hating each other before then, we'll be just fine." Gabriel shook his head in bemusement at the sheer cheerfulness of her cynicism. And she thinks I might be good at this kind of work? I think I've got a long way to go. "And will they stop hating each other after that?" he said.
Delvecchio looked up at him mildly as she gathered up her papers. "/ won't live long enough to find out," she said, "but that's hardly an issue. I'll see you in the morning."
She went out, and a few moments later Gabriel went after her, suddenly very eager indeed to see the "bloodshed" begin the next afternoon.
Chapter Three
THE REST OF the day's schedule went haywire, which gave Gabriel the hint he needed that things were indeed in the air. For one thing, many marine staff under Hal's supervision were pulled back from other duties to be run over to Callirhoe to assist in maintenance work secondary to the mission she had just completed. The swearing started in earnest when word spread among Falada's marine complement of the action that the other ship had seen not six hours ago. It had not been hand-to-hand work-just shipboard stuff, the Star Force ship going in low to preempt the little Phorcys-based raiders who had attacked Ordinen, Eraklion's biggest open-cast mine-but the marines assigned to Callirhoe managed to make it sound like the Second Galactic War when they came aboard that night for the usual "two-ships" social. All this meant that Gabriel's spatball team's meeting had to be postponed, and the idea of doing any further reading of transcripts that night went right out the airlock. Suit drill, though conducted as professionally as always-after all, there was no treating casually the only thing that stood between you and space-had more than the usual buzz about it. Crew morale was always a major concern for Star Force. They knew what made their ships effective-not machines, but people. So any time two Concord Star Force vessels met for the first time in a system, especially when they were carrying complements of marines, there would be a social get-together as soon as circumstances permitted it. The two captains, having conferred at some length, were fairly certain that there would be no further antics from the local system-based ships-especially with one Star Force vessel in orbit around each of the two "offending" planets keeping an eye on them and (via a few clandestinely sown surveillance satellites) on Eraklion as well.
By 2000, the temporary walls separating the main briefing room from its twin next door had been opened out so that one big space was available. By 2030, alternating panels of white-silver and midnight– velvet curtains had been hung up to soften the feel of the place, the lights had been lowered, and the room was full of tables and chairs and food. Lots of food. If there was anything anyone knew about marines, it was that they ate their weight in protein every day, just to prove they could. The other thing that everyone knew about marines-that they could talk the tusks off a weren-was also being proven all over the room.
"You shoulda seen it," someone was saying to Hal as Gabriel came up beside him. "It was just like a dirg's nest when you knock it down off the rocks. They came in real low over Eraklion's spaceward side. The Phorcyns thought they were under the radar, and maybe they were, of the ground-based stuff… but not ours. There were maybe two hundred of them-little ships, not even military, some of them-just hoppers, just private craft with guns. Are these people crazy? What kind of line are their bosses selling them that they'll go up against a cruiser with nothing but the family in-system flitter with a couple of grenade cannons strapped to it?"
"Phorcyn fanatics," someone said. Laughter rippled through the group as they caught the play on words. The guy who was talking, a tall thin red-haired man, shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I'll tell you this: fanatic or not, they knew how to fly, that bunch. We were watching them on the repeaters in the landing craft, and they were right down and dirty with the mountain chain around that place. Thought they were going to do themselves permanent damage, some of them. But they seemed to know those mountains pretty well."
"A little too well," said another of the marines nearby, a slender little dark-haired woman with big dark brown eyes. "If they'd gotten down there to take the attack to a second stage, we would have had to root them out, and that would have been entertaining."
The man who had been talking first shrugged. "It didn't happen," he said, "and our weapons were clean, anyway, if it had. I would've given a lot to see their faces, though, when they came in close on the mine and saw the ship rising up out of that big ol' hole in the ground with all her guns hot. Never tell me that
Captain Devereaux can't make her boat sit up and beg! And as for all those little ships-" He broke out laughing. "Just like a dirg's nest. They went scattering in every direction that God sent and took themselves away before something a lot worse than they were expecting happened to them." "Meaning us," said the dark-haired woman, grinning.
"Yeah, well, every now and then you have to sit one out," said the marine who had been speaking. "We'll get the next dance, somewhere else. Hey, look-"
Noisy whistles and shrieks went up as two shapely forms walked in, in full Star Force dress black, everything from the full-length skirts to the wound sashes to the optional rakish hats. Captain Dareyev and Captain Devereaux, the latter looking somewhat abashed by the deafening welcome. She looked over at Elinke. Elinke shrugged and led her over to the first refreshment table to get her a glass of wine, but they never had a chance, being well mobbed by every nearby marine before more than a few steps had been taken. The marines always appreciated their captains even when they weren't women. A sharp set of reflexes in the center seat could save your life and those of all your teammates. But female captains had a special mystique-not entirely, Gabriel thought, having anything to do with their superior reflexes.
Even more marines arrived to congratulate the captains, and the two women smiled and let them get on with it, glancing at each other resignedly. Gabriel smiled a little too and turned back to the marine who had been talking, the one from Callirhoe. He was still talking to the brown-eyed marine, but he was slowing down somewhat. Not exactly running out of steam, perhaps, but he and a lot of his buddies, to Gabriel's eye, had that about-to-fall-over look that he had seen more than enough times in his career so far. Men who had been sitting in their shuttles, suited up, ready to be delivered to some godforsaken spot that they had never seen before, ready to take it and hold it as if it were their own, as if they would shed their last drop of blood for it-and indeed they would. Waiting for that to happen for hours on end, sometimes days. The men and women who went through that on a regular basis showed changes in their faces that Gabriel had learned to recognize without being able to describe. Tonight it looked most like weariness to him. And fear, too. But that was not something you would say out loud to a marine, not until you knew him or her very well indeed. For the meantime, these were brothers and sisters, but not yet brothers in blood, except in the abstract. Sooner or later, it might happen . . . probably would. But you didn't force the pace.
The tiredness in those eyes faded for a moment. "Hey, brother," the marine said, "nice place you have here."
"We like it," Gabriel said. "You're welcome! Gabriel Connor." "Mil Wyens."
"Where are you from when you're not from a ship?" "Orion League. Damrak."
"Hey, we're neighbors!" Gabriel grinned a little. Neighborhood was something Orions took seriously, even if it was spread over many light-years. "I was born on Jaeger, and then we moved to Bluefall. My folks moved there on a colonization contract." "Long way back there," Mil said. "You must not see 'em often."
"Not my dad, anyway. Not since I enlisted. Dad's still on Bluefall; he's retired. Mom died a few years ago," Gabriel added, knowing from too much experience that if he didn't add it, someone would most likely ask. Better to get it over with. Mil's green eyes looked troubled. "Hey, I'm sorry."
The usual response, it's all right, it was a release, finally, came up. But for some reason Gabriel rejected it and just nodded. He said, "You guys did a great job out there today." "We didn't do much of anything," Mil said, sounding rather disappointed. "You did, though," Gabriel said. "Waiting. Waiting's hard."
He thought of the long hours down in the ice on Epsedra. The explosions overhead. And down in the crevasses, the slow drip and trickle of melting ice and the bright brittle sound when a bomb came down too close, shattering the ice into spears and shrapnel. In some ways, that seemed like another lifetime, ages ago. Some ways it seemed like a matter of minutes. And it could sneak up on you at other times when you were waiting, sometimes for something much more mundane and make itself a nuisance. Mil looked at him without much expression for a moment or so and then made half a smile and said, "Had enough of it for today."
"Let me get you something," Gabriel said. "How much 'something' do you want in it?" "Normal dosage," Mil said after a moment. "No point in replacing palpitations with a headache." Gabriel went off to fetch a couple of Pink Deaths. When he came back and handed one of them to Mil, the brown-eyed marine who had also drifted away in search of something liquid, now came back and leaned over Mil's shoulder. This was something of an accomplishment. She had to stand on tiptoe to do it, and she nearly spilled her drink down Mil's back in the process. "Mil, what about you-know-who's comm code?" "Huh?"
"You remember. You were going to give me his comm code. You said you wrote it down." "I did. Now where did I leave it?" Mil started going through his pockets.
"In the go-down boat," said the brown-eyed marine to Gabriel, and the various others who were gathered around, "he was sitting next to someone whom I would-someone in whom I am extremely interested. Tell me you didn't lose it," she said, poking Mil meaningfully in the ribs, "or you are going to have a bad weapons drill in a few days. Very bad."
"No, I know I have it, it's-" Mil kept going through his pockets, coming up with the usual clutter: cardkey for his quarters, cardkey for the secure locker in his wardrobe, and a little dark something. But the darkness didn't last. It flashed dully as Gabriel looked at it. He glanced away, wondering if the room lighting had something to do with it, but it didn't. "What is that?" he asked.
Mil was concentrating on going through his other pocket now, and looked up, slightly confused at being distracted from this. "Oh, this? It's a luck stone. I got it on…" He frowned, bemused, until his eyebrows threatened to bang into each other. "Dilemma, I think it was."
"You couldn't have gotten it on Dilemma," the brown-eyed marine said. "We didn't get leave there.
Where is that comm code?"
"Not the last time. The time before last."
"You didn't have this thing then," the brown-eyed marine said. "I didn't see it until we'd been to Tractate. Stop stalling."
"There wasn't anything on Tractate. I got it on . . ." He stopped going through the other pocket, looking annoyed. "Never mind."
Curious, Gabriel watched the little smooth thing in Mil's hand. It was vaguely oval and more flat than spherical. It had an odd metallic sheen to it, almost like brushed metal. But the color was black, except when it glowed from inside, a little diffuse light like a coal being blown to life and fading, blown bright
and fading again. "How does it do that?" Gabriel said.
"I don't know," said the man, turning the little object over in his hand. "Batteries? No, I don't know at all; some guy in the daily market in the city we were in-I know," he said triumphantly to the brown– haired marine. "It was Dorring."
"It wasn't Dorring. You weren't on Dorring. Where did you put it?"
"She's right," said another she-marine who had come up behind Mil, a tall blonde woman. "You were in medical stir for nearly a week that starfall. Remember the-"
"Ow," said Mil, "yeah, did you have to remind me?" He pocketed the "luck piece" and turned around.
"What are you doing here anyway? I thought you had duty this shift."
"I did," she said, "but some schedules have been changed. Better check yours."
"Not before he gives me that comm code!"
That small knot of marines saluted Gabriel with their glasses and wandered off toward the food, leaving Gabriel looking after them while one of his floor mates, Mick Roscinzsky, came up beside him, carrying a couple of drinks. "Here," he said as he handed one to Gabriel. "What is it?"
"How should I know? All I know is you were standing there with your two arms the same length." Gabriel took an experimental sip of one of the drinks and made a face. "Did it occur to anyone to put anything in this but alcohol?"
Mick looked shocked. "Oh, this is one of the guest drinks. Sorry." He took it away from Gabriel and gave him his own.
Gabriel sipped it, looking suspiciously at Mick. This drink was mostly fizzy water. "Better," he said, realizing that he had nearly been on the receiving end of a hoary old trick intended for Falada 's guests but not her own marine complement. "Are they buying it?" " 'Fraid so. I feel sorry for their tiny heads tomorrow."
Gabriel grinned and wandered along behind Mick toward the bar. One of his other floor mates, Charles Redpath, was tending bar. He saw Dawn Steilin, a second lieutenant of his acquaintance, come moseying along and say to Charles, "I'll have a Squadron Special."
Charles reached down, chose a glass, filled it from one of the clear flasks nearby. Dawn took the glass from him, raised it, said, "Up the Concord, boys!" and knocked it back in three long gulps. A few of the marines from Callirhoe looked at her in appreciation or astonishment. One of them leaned close to whiff at the glass, or possibly her breath-or possibly just because Dawn was pleasant to lean close to-then said in some surprise, "Austrin gin?"
Dawn nodded, gave the guy a bright and completely un-addled look, and wandered away again. "I'll have one of those," said the marine who'd spoken to Dawn, and Charles, with a slight smile, handed him a glass the size of the one Dawn had downed.
Gabriel kept his own smile out of sight. The glass from which Dawn had been drinking, he knew, had been behind the bar, rim-down in a saucer of that Austrin gin. The flask from which it had been filled, though, the flask identical to the one from which Charles was now pouring, was full of plain old water. The present flask, though, was full of straight Austrin. Their guests would go away from this party with the belief that their hosts were supermen, at least insofar as their ability to hold their drink was involved. Gabriel turned away, half afraid he would lose control of that smile, and found Jake Ricel standing behind him, apparently watching the show at the bar. The dark-haired man was near Gabriel's height but less broad in the shoulders and leaner. His fair-skinned face was altogether unremarkable, one of those
people who blended easily into any crowd without being noticed. Jake caught Gabriel's eye and glanced off to one side.
Now what the hell, Gabriel thought. Of all the times to– For this was his shipboard Intelligence contact, the man whom he had seen only once or twice, and that accidentally, in the last whole year. Jake was Star Force and worked up in Drive Engineering. From a marine's point of view, this would normally make him suspect regardless of any possible Intelligence connections, since people who could actually understand the gravity induction engine were assumed to be, as the saying went, "a hundred and twenty– one hours from a nervous breakdown." But he seemed otherwise overtly normal according to people Gabriel knew who had worked with him. Gabriel said, "Oh, hi, Jake," as casually as he could. "Drink?"
"What you're having," said Jake, glancing idly over to where the two captains were unsuccessfully attempting to fend off another wave of marines.
Gabriel turned back to the bar and said, "Charles? Two Squadron Specials."
Charles looked over at them, eyed Jake, recognized him as in-ship but not marine, and handed Gabriel
two drinks that looked the same but differed significantly in composition. "Thanks," Gabriel said.
"We take care of our own," Charles said and turned around to take another order.
Gabriel and Jake walked away slowly from the bar, sipping their drinks. Jake's was very full. "How do
you people drink this stuff like you do?" he said.
"Genetic engineering," said Gabriel. "Haven't seen you for a while."
"No need," said Jake, "until now. Something needs to be looked into."
"Oh?"
Jake nodded, making a face as he took another drink. " 'Upabove' is a little curious about some things that might or might not have been seen in this system."
"Well, that's real definite," Gabriel said. "If you mean people from Phorcys and Ino shooting at each other, there's plenty of that to be curious about."
"No," Jake said, "not that, specifically." His voice got lower, and he turned to look toward the doorway. " 'Upabove' is wondering whether any of the diplomatic staffs from Phorcys or Ino have mentioned anything about . . . trouble in the system. Trouble that's not of their own making." "There's more than enough of the kind they make themselves to keep them busy," Gabriel said. "What kind of things are 'Upabove' curious about?" He was mystified.
Jake shrugged, looking around him again, so that Gabriel wondered exactly what or who he was looking for. Anyone close enough to stand a chance of eavesdropping seemed intent on their own conversations. "Aliens, especially aliens that aren't usually seen in these parts."
Gabriel shook his head. "For creep's sake, this is the Verge," he said. "You might run into any one of thirty alien races out here and never think anything of it."
"It might not be one of the recognized ones," said Jake, even more softly. Gabriel could hardly hear him now. "Making trouble somewhere in the system . . . trying to keep it quiet. Star Force might not know about it, but possibly the diplomatic types coming and going might drop a line or two on the subject." "Not usually where we can hear," Gabriel said. "They think we're spies half the time as it is." "But some of you they get used to looking at," Jake said. "You've been seen helping out in high places a lot lately." He gave Gabriel a slightly quizzical look.
Gabriel shrugged. "The ambassador's preference," he said. "I don't understand it myself." But Jake was looking at him, waiting for an answer. Then he looked at the doorway again, as if unusually eager to get
out of there.
"All right, sure," Gabriel said. "I'll see what I can find out. But I don't know if I'm going to be able to help you all that much. I've been shipboard, mostly, and I think I'm supposed to be that way for the next couple of days anyway."
"Well," Jake said, "don't worry about that. Just keep your eyes and ears open and see what you can find out."
"Sure." But privately Gabriel felt sure he would find out almost nothing. "I'll leave a message on your computer if I need to talk to you."
"No!" Jake said, with surprising vehemence. "Just find me. Make an excuse to get up my way or have someone bring me a message by hand." Gabriel shrugged again, agreeing. Even now, there were times when an officer might prefer to have a message hand carried rather than put in the system. "If you do hear anything, I'll have a message for you to take back to the source. Not a word to anyone of who gave it to you-you'll have to find a way to slip it to the target without revealing the source." Gabriel nodded. Jake pushed his unfinished drink back into Gabriel's free hand, turned, and disappeared through the nearest passageway. Just like that, he was gone.
Gabriel shook his head, bemused, and turned his attention back to the stir in the room, the laughter of relief and release, the sight of people drifting around, eating and drinking and unwinding. The captains had finally been able to break away from their myriad admirers and sit down off to one side by themselves. Their heads were bent close together and their drinks were forgotten as they conferred. Gabriel caught Elinke's eye just briefly as she looked up and around, and he saluted her with his empty glass. She looked at him, grinned slightly, lifted both hands as if holding something in them, and put her eyebrows up. Gabriel realized he was still holding two glasses and went off hurriedly to put one of them down.
As he was making his way to one of the buffet tables, Hal came lounging along toward Gabriel. Hal eyed the second glass disapprovingly. "Bad day?" "Not mine," Gabriel said, just slightly nettled.
"Oh. Good, because schedules have been shuffled," said Hal. "Have you seen?" "I haven't looked since this afternoon, no."
"Better go check. I had a word with the computer and got a few little surprises. You will too. Among other things, you're on shuttle duty tomorrow."
"What? That's impossible! The am-" Gabriel stopped himself. "I was told I was going to be shipboard. The negotiations."
"Look again," Hal said, not entirely without sympathy. "Oh-dark-forty, you poor thing. And here you thought you were going to have six whole hours to sleep this off."
Reading, reading something for pleasure for a change, instead of the never-ending bad fairy tale of the
negotiation transcripts, had been more on Gabriel's mind, at least enough of it to lull him gently to sleep.
Now there was going to be little enough chance of that. "Well, frack " he said. "What fun."
"Better turn in early," Hal said. "I know I am. Shame to miss the rest of the party."
Gabriel looked around at a room full of relatively happy marines and Star Force people. It had been a
good day for most of them in that none of them had died. "Yeah," he said. "But there'll be others.
Meanwhile … "
"Yup, me too. See you in the morning," Hal said, "or what comes all too soon before it." He finished his own drink, put it down, and headed out the door.
Gabriel got rid of the glasses, paused to snaffle a couple of small meatrolls and devour them, and then slowly went the same way Hal had.
Schedule changes. He was willing enough to believe that the ambassador might have been behind them. Keep your eyes and ears open, she had said.
But so had Jake, just now, in almost the same words. And he hadn't seemed concerned that Gabriel thought he was going to be stuck shipside.
Did Jake know that my schedule was going to be changed this way? Gabriel thought. And if he did know that, how did he know that?
But after a moment Gabriel put the thought out of his mind. There was probably no point in him wasting consideration on it. He had long since gotten a feeling that as regarded Intelligence, the less you seemed to stop and think about the things you found out, the better the upper ups liked it. And it was likely enough that the ambassador was involved somehow in that as well. The Diplomatic service and the Intelligence people were well known to work closely together. The briefing earlier in the day suggested that just that kind of thing might have been going on.
Gabriel took himself off to his quarters, dropped a sober pill, and immediately turned in. He was a little uneasy, but still excited about what the next day might bring. It wasn't that many more hours, anyway, until he would find out.
Chapter Four
HE WAS UP even earlier than he thought he would be. Even though he was on shuttle duty, it was diplomatic shuttle duty and thus required the dress blues rather than fatigues. As soon as he was in a fresh uniform, Gabriel went down to the great echoing steel-arched barn of the cargo/shuttle deck that held a half-dozen of the long wedge-shaped spacecraft. He immediately made himself useful, talking to the dispatch chief about which shuttles were scheduled in and out and when. He found out who they were carrying and where they were going. Partly it was gossip, for the shuttle chief was half beside himself with the hours his pilots were having to keep and the kind of work they were having to do. But Gabriel had a half-formed idea that it would be a good idea if he could be on as many of the shuttles as he could today, at least without attracting undue notice. Being eyes and ears was all very well, but not so obviously that no one would say anything in front of you.
The next five hours were desperately wearing for Gabriel. Most of a marine's duty when doing diplomatic escort duty involved standing very still and looking like you might be useful at any moment, but not this moment. It was one of the reasons that marines learned the kind of mind-control exercise that helped them to keep perfectly still and blank-faced without twitching, yet still allowed the mind to roam at least moderately free. The trick worked, helping Gabriel to keep enough attention on the business around him while preventing him from falling asleep where he stood.
He was on that first shuttle at oh-dark-forty, the one that went down to Phorcys to fetch Rallet, the chief investigator for the Phorcys government. Gabriel had no problem with the run down, which was enjoyable enough. He always liked near-planet work, and the view over the planet's peculiar bands of north-south-running mountains intrigued him, leaving him wondering about the tectonic forces that might have formed them. But the enjoyment ceased as soon as they grounded at a small private airfield near Endwith, the main city in the planet's northern hemisphere, and picked up Rallet. Gabriel resigned himself to the problem he'd gotten himself into. He would have preferred to escort almost anyone else, for he had done escort duty for Rallet once before. He therefore had a much more intimate and unpleasant knowledge of the man than the interminable transcripts contained. Rallet climbed onto the shuttle as if he owned it and never even glanced at Gabriel's salute, offered from the spot by the inner airlock that Gabriel would occupy during the trip to Falada. Well, it was Rallet's privilege to treat Gabriel like furniture if he pleased to, at least as far as protocol went. And so Rallet did, stalking past Gabriel without so much as a blink and sinking into the ridiculously luxurious bench seat the likes of which Hal and his people had spent the whole previous day installing in the shuttles. "Tat," Rallet muttered under his breath to his aide, who was busily opening a case and going through paperwork.
"Pardon, sir?" said the aide, though Gabriel guessed that the aide knew well enough what his master had said.
"Tat," Rallet said, more forcefully. "Look at these disgusting interiors. It's an insult, a calculated insult. This vehicle cannot have been maintained for months. Look at the stains! I shall speak to the ambassador about it when we arrive."
He went on in that vein for a long while, and Gabriel, true to his request from the ambassador and his thinly veiled orders from Jake, listened to every word. It was unpleasant work. The man's arrogance was apparently incorrigible, and his ego was the size of a planet to judge by his conversation, for everything that happened in his immediate vicinity was inevitably pointed directly at him as a carefully crafted insult to his position, his dignity, his political affiliations, his planet's sovereignty. He complained about the unsatisfactory course of the negotiations, about Star Force's unwelcome presence in his system, about the inequity of the agreement they were trying to foist on his free and proud people, about the covert intentions of the Concord toward his world. Gabriel had seen much of this material in the transcripts, and it gained nothing by being delivered live. But it's odd, Gabriel thought, he almost sounds like… The thought trailed off in another withering attack by Rallet, this time on why it took so ridiculously long for the shuttle to merely get from the planet's surface to Falada. Gabriel turned his mind away from the idea of how pleasant it would be to tie this bloated warmongering bureaucrat into a chair and lecture him for several hours on the specifics of low-fuel-high-decay tangential orbits. Then the thought he had been chasing abruptly clarified itself. He sounds like he's reading from a script, like it's an act. Like he really wants to stop. But why? came the ambassador's question again. Why now? Gabriel listened and heard nothing that suggested an answer.
After twenty minutes or so the ship began its final approach to Falada, and she took them inboard. Rallet's poor assistant, who had been trying to get a word in here or there during the tirade, finally said, "What do you wish to be carrying as we go in, sir? The last offer?" "No," Rallet said, "the order of business." "Which one, sir?"
"Ours, you idiot," Rallet said, and started fussing with his restraining belts long before they were far enough inside for it to be safe for him to do so.
Gabriel blinked, but did no more. So the ambassador had been right about this, at least. Rallet had an "order of business" that differed, possibly radically, from the one which Delvecchio openly intended. Might be something, might not. Better than nothing, though. He made a note to get word to the
ambassador about this any way he could, well before the proceedings began.
The shuttle door was opened from outside, and ceremonial pipes were blown as usual. Rallet got off, actually bumping into Gabriel on the way out, jostling him. Gabriel gave way and caught his balance without looking as if he were doing so. Then when the man was away and well out of sight, Gabriel let himself have one grimace of pure rage before getting off the shuttle and looking around to see where the next one was.
The rest of the morning, to his annoyance, was not even as interesting as riding with the detestable Rallet. There were two more shuttle runs to Phorcys, once to pick up the secondary Phorcyn negotiator, Rallet's chief assistant, and once for the delegation's "support team"-ten quiet men and women who seemed to spend most of their time repeating the spoken proceedings near-silently into tiny repeaters held to their throats. They had no equivalent on the Inoan side. Gabriel knew that Phorcys had several major languages, but he didn't think these people were translators. Maybe they were record keepers? There was no telling. At least they tended to chat freely with one another on the way up to Falada, and the talk was at least vaguely interesting, as eavesdropping often is. But they said nothing about anything going on elsewhere in the system, overt or covert; and since Gabriel's position, in terms of protocol, forbade him to speak except when spoken to, he was unable to draw them out.
That shuttle in turn came home to Falada and discharged its passengers. Gabriel wearily got out, looked around to see which shuttle was the next to go out, and boarded it. This one went to a small military airfield near Ino's planetary capital. It returned with the Inoan secondary negotiator-who had a terrible cold– and his four staff, all of whom were trying desperately to avoid being too near their superior while equally trying not to look like they were trying to avoid him. The poor man himself, all wrapped up in the voluminous silken formal robes that Inoans favored, hardly noticed his staff at all. He was too busy sneezing and coughing as if he was trying to dislodge a thrutch that had somehow become lodged in one of his lungs. Gabriel escaped from that shuttle and found himself briefly standing off to one side of the hangar and brushing his uniform as if it were possible to get the germs off it that way. I'd better take an antiviral before the session this afternoon, he thought with resignation, and just stood where he was for the moment, wishing duty didn't require him to get on another shuttle as soon as one presented itself. One did within a matter of minutes. It was delightful, in a way, to have a few moments to admire the grace with which a shuttle could come sailing in through the hangar's force curtain and settle itself in place. This one did so with no wasted motions, came down, and sat there ticking gently to itself for a little while, the metal of its wings still shedding residual heat from the escape from atmosphere. The shuttle's hatch cracked open, top and bottom. A delay, and then after a few moments, another marine guard debarked and walked away from it, a woman who looked at least as tired of this kind of duty as Gabriel was. From inside the door of the grounded shuttle came a voice, which Gabriel was positioned fairly well to hear, saying, "-to know anything about that business, it's not my affair." Gabriel took a few steps backward, into the shadow of the shuttle's starboard airfoil. There was a reply from inside, but too far inside the shuttle for Gabriel to make it out as anything but a mutter. "I don't care," said the voice nearer the door in answer, "maybe she is cleared for it, but I've no orders to tell her, and if these people can't detect their ships out that far either, then it's not a problem for us, is it?" More muttering came from inside. The voice near the door suddenly became less distinct, but much more vehement. "-want to," it said, "you go ahead and tell them… kidnappings and . . . vanishing, but… mind being dismissed for fantasies about outsystem ghouls and …" The voice went low, too low to hear any more. Then just two words were audible: ". . . ghost ships…"
The other voice, nearer the door, said, "Ridiculous."
A man stepped out, an Inoan, one of the other secondary negotiators. Behind him another human walked down the carpeted walkway. She was not an Inoan, but a woman in the plain grays of the Diplomatic service-Delvecchio's assistant ambassador, Areh Wuhain. She went after the man, who looked unconcerned. Her own expression was extremely annoyed, but Gabriel watched her smooth it out as they headed for the airlock leading to the main corridors of Falada.
Now that, Gabriel thought, was something. Certainly something bizarre that he didn't understand terribly
well, but possibly useful. He rehearsed the dialogue in his mind and locked it in place with the short-
term memory technique he'd been taught and then looked for another shuttle to board.
"Are you crazy? Nothing's left, thank heaven," came Hal's voice from across the hangar. Hal was
looking wearily at the last shuttle down, leaning against die second-to-last shuttle with his arms folded.
"No, I tell a lie. One more, but that's not for another hour. Some hold up down on Ino."
"So they're all here now?" Gabriel said, strolling over to lean beside him briefly.
"All the important ones. Gods, what a waste," Hal said and breathed out. "I saw you getting off after Old Flat Face this morning. What a treat he must have been. You looked like you wanted to throw up." "Duty before comfort," Gabriel said.
"For this kind of duty? You are sick," Hal said. "Sick. Your blood sugar must be off somehow. Did you take a pill before you went to bed?"
"Of course I did, you bollix," Gabriel said and shoved him amiably.
"Something else must be wrong with you, then. It's not normal for a marine to actively seek any duty except fighting."
"Well," Gabriel said, "maybe, but there's one I'm damned well going to actively seek out-the meeting this afternoon."
"Fireworks?" Hal said. "That 'violence' I heard mentioned?"
"I wish I could sell tickets," Gabriel said. He sighed, stood up straight again. "Never mind. I've got to go take an anti-cold nostrum."
"Did we catch a little chill?" Hal said, teasing, as Gabriel headed for the airlock back to the ship. "More than that," Gabriel said, and added to himself: A whole lot more than that, I think.
Three hours later it began in the large room that had been set aside aboard Falada as more or less neutral territory for the Ambassador and the negotiating parties to use. It was plush and beautifully decorated, looking like a drawing room one might find in a castle on some ancient Solar Union world. Wood paneling graced the walls. A suavely polished table gleamed beneath the non-glaring, soothing light. Graceful abstract art hung on the walls or stood in the corners on demure pedestals. Any normal person would have found the effect restful, calming, but these were not normal people. Gabriel stood in his "guard" position by the door and waited, aware that his pulse rate was starting to rise. The negotiating teams filed in, their leaders coming last. Rallet came first, with his oddly shaped head that made Gabriel think that at some point in his life his mother had lost patience with him and hit him in the face with a shovel. Then came ErDai-shan, with a face that had long since fixed itself into deep and permanent lines of dissatisfaction with everything around her, from the lighting and the shape of the table to the fact that she had to breathe the same air as her opponent across the table did. They looked at each other with animated loathing. It occurred to Gabriel suddenly that what he was seeing here was a
marriage … one into which the ambassador had unwelcomely intruded, bearing an olive branch instead of what each of the parties wanted: a stick to beat the other one with. Gabriel, meanwhile, held his breath to see what they would make of the stick that the ambassador was about to produce. "Thank you all for your promptness," Delvecchio said. "Before we resume the proceedings, I must take your excellencies into my confidence and ask you both a question that will determine much of the direction of what remains for us all to do today."
They looked at her attentively, with loathing only a little less than that they reserved for each other. Their respective civil servants shuffled and muttered and rustled paperwork, bound and unbound, and sorted carts, already uneasy with the breach in the order of the day. "Did you really think you could get away with it?" said the ambassador.
Those two faces went from loathing to the beginnings of outrage. Gabriel had seen this before, the how– dare-you-speak-that-way-to-me expression. But it was reflex in these two, and now it was edged with something much more noticeable: fear.
"I must inform you that this will be our last meeting," said the ambassador, "one way or the other-except for the very minor tidying up, which your assistants will manage. Since we last met, conditions have changed."
"Ambassador, this is outrageous. We are not children to be scolded by a mere-" "Ordinen," said Delvecchio. "Mashan."
Both their mouths fell open, even ErDaishan's mouth, that mouth whose lips never moved while its owner spoke. Now it worked, that mouth, and words tried to make it out, but couldn't. "Ordinen is safe," said Delvecchio, "and we have holo, lots of it, of your ships attempting the attack. And Mashan. Yes, Mashan is not just the name of a small town in the dust any more. We have holo of that too. Dirty breeding," and the ambassador shook her head like a mother tut-tutting over a child's dirty playclothes. "What will your investors think? And what about Ordinen, which you had guaranteed could produce eight thousand tons of refined ores per week? Not after all those tunnels had been blown into one great crater, it wouldn't."
The two stood up slowly, from either side of the table, with expressions of terrible rage on their faces, and they began to scream at each other.
The Crack! that came from the middle of the table stopped them. It was the cane, the one the ambassador had used to come aboard for the first few meetings, the long black cane she walked with or made show of walking with sometimes. Now, though, Gabriel finally understood what it was really for. "Don't bother," said the ambassador, very softly. "Collusion. It has been heavy in the air for the last few weeks. You two thought you were quite circumspect. No one knew about this, not even your own people, just the very few in your own defense forces whom you suborned to this business. Here, on this matter only, just this once, you were able to agree."
The silence that fell had weight. First it pushed ErDaishan back down into her seat, then Rallet. "So many other things you might have agreed on," said the ambassador, "but no. This, though, you thought you could get away with. I am sorry to interfere with your perception of your control over of the scheme of things, sir, madam. But now you have pulled the forces of the world around you a little too far out of shape. And like gravity and the other forces, the response is immediate. The talks are dissolved by cause of concrete proof of bad faith on both sides, and I must report my failure to the Concord." The two Thalaassan delegates sitting opposite one another went ashen. They did not start screaming, but they did start talking. Slowly at first, then faster. One of them, then the other, and then both together.
They became two matching portions of an incoherent babble, and Gabriel finally had to stop trying to make sense of it. The ambassador said nothing at all, just let them talk, let them run down. It took nearly half an hour.
Finally that heavy silence fell again. The ambassador leaned back in her chair and waited.
"Madam," said ErDaishan finally, "you do not understand. It cannot end like this-"
"It has ended," said Delvecchio. Was that just the shadow of a smile on her face, Gabriel wondered?
"If there was something that we could do-"
"If there was just some way that-"
"I await your suggestions with interest," said Delvecchio, "but I have no idea what can possibly restore the status quo that your acts have shattered."
She sat there and listened to them for another hour. During this period Gabriel had to revert to mind– control again, using the routine that helps keep the body from twitching while the brain is wishing it was somewhere else, anywhere else. The mitigating factor, the only thing helping Gabriel feel less than completely twitchy, was that the two negotiators-helped eventually by their teams-slowly began to suggest the very series of face-saving maneuvers that Delvecchio had described to him and written up for her team three days before. It occurred to Rallet and ErDai-shan in fits and starts, in pieces that had to be rearranged, and some of those pieces caused screaming nearly as vehement as that which had begun the session. But slowly they created the solution that Delvecchio had predicted, almost paragraph for paragraph as the writing up began, as if they had genuinely thought of it all themselves. Gabriel had often enough wondered if the ambassador had a little mindwalker in her somewhere. Now he was less sure. What he was seeing was certainly something that could pass for predicting the future or mind reading, but it was neither of these. It was an understanding of people in general and these two people in particular and the circumstances that surrounded them-and it was so profound that once or twice it made Gabriel shiver. Also once or twice he saw ErDaishan or Rallet look up from the documents wearing an expression that was a terrible mixture of anger and, not fear, but now (toward the end of it all) disgust. Disgust at having been caught, at the unfairness of it. Gabriel looked at the ambassador, but no reaction to their expressions revealed itself on her face. She was like a statue, one that occasionally spoke to approve something and otherwise caused people to make notes very fast as they worked to produce the approving result again.
This process ran at least another three hours. Gabriel lost track of the time. His inner clock had for the time being been badly skewed by having to keep himself still. He was actually jarred back to consciousness-not that he had been sleeping, just elsewhere in mind-by the ambassador's voice saying, very simply, "No."
"I don't want to call it an agreement," ErDaishan was saying. "To imply that we agree on-" "It has to be called something that will suggest to your respective peoples that there is some hope of the war stopping," said the ambassador, "and since you will not allow it to be called a treaty, because you refuse to agree not to go back to war again later, or a settlement, because you claim nothing is settled, then agreement it must be. No lesser term will produce the stabilizing effect on the markets that you require for this whole process to bear fruit."
They stared at her. Until now, all her interjections had been fairly gentle, leading them in the direction she had predicted for them, and in which they now intended, however unwillingly, to go. There was still a little fight left in them, though.
Rallet said, "Naturally we will require time to prepare our people for-"
"Sir, I think not," said the ambassador. "There are many eyes watching this affair, and delay will be seen as uncertainty. The stock markets are watching, and you all know how little time it takes the commodities and futures markets, in particular, to start becoming nervous. For all our sakes, it would be well if the formalities were concluded within no more than the next twenty-four hours. And the news of the actual settlement must be made public immediately." There, just for a moment, the voice lost its kid– glove quality. "Besides, your people are well prepared for this moment. They have been most intent on these proceedings. The commentators on both worlds' Grids, and some of those outside, have been predicting something very like this outcome– though it remains for you to stun them with the details. A few of them, of course, you will be delighted to prove very wrong about those details. Doubtless you will want to start arranging the interviews."
The man looked in one direction and the woman in another, toward their respective staffs. Gabriel saw the hungry glint of eyes in one face, the set mouth, hard and vengeful, in the other. Both expressions frightened him, for they were wholly about personal pleasure, personal point-scoring, nothing better. Lives of thousands of millions of people would be affected by what had happened here today. Thousands (Gabriel thought, Gabriel hoped) would now not have to die. But neither of these two cared, not really. They were much more interested at this particular moment in getting back at people who had called them names or embarrassed them in public. And how many of their other moments are like this? Gabriel thought, trying hard to keep the look out of his face. How many of my brothers and sisters might have to die protecting the ambassador if these two should suddenly decide that she has embarrassed them?
"These proceedings are therefore complete," said Delvecchio, "and the only detail remaining is your signature, sir, and yours, madam, on the instrument of agreement. And I congratulate you on becoming so notable a part of your worlds' history."
The two bowed to Delvecchio across the table and reached out to their assistants for styli. Just a little hesitation there? Gabriel thought, but he could not be certain he had seen it. The two cart-based copies of the document were inserted into pad readers and pushed across to each of the signatories by one of their assistants. Each of them signed. That hesitation again. It was there. And then it was over.
Delvecchio stood. The two seated delegations looked at her.
"Thank you," she said. "This is of course the informal version of the ceremony. If you would be so kind as to inform me when you have had a chance to discuss this with your governments, I will be pleased to be at the ceremony tomorrow where this accommodation is made public. In time for the opening of the markets in the most closely involved systems, of course."
"Certainly, ambassador. But as for the formal signing, it will take time to arrange, and in a few days we can-"
"The fine print," said the ambassador, "says 'tomorrow.' "
The signatories looked at her. Then silently they both bowed to her again and made their way out. Gabriel watched them go, ErDaishan and Rallet, each with his or her little soberly dressed entourage, each walking rather ostentatiously next to the other. It seemed to Gabriel as he watched them go that he had never seen two people be so far apart who had only a meter of space between them. They were entirely aware of the watching eyes, the listening ears. They were practicing their act. They would have to have it right by tomorrow after all.
The room emptied rather quickly, as if something unpleasant hung in the air, a scent that people were
anxious to be rid of in a hurry. Finally, it was as it had been the other morning: Gabriel and the ambassador-she slowly gathering up her papers and carts, he watching her, and after a moment, moving to help.
For some minutes she said nothing, ordering her papers, looking at some of them more carefully than others, holding up one cart-the one with the rewritten agreement on it-and placing it carefully on the top of the pile. Then she breathed out, just once, a weary sound.
When she looked up again, some of the tiredness was gone from her eyes, but not all of it. "So how did
that look to you?" she said.
"Ugly," Gabriel said after a moment.
Delvecchio nodded. "Ours is the stepchild of the military arts," she said. "Guns are faster. Cruisers are prettier." She straightened and looked at Gabriel. "But sometimes we win the fight, and people don't die. Sometimes."
She picked up the one last thing, her cane, and went out the door. Gabriel swallowed, for she was actually using it. She walked out carefully, looking not like a sword or a banner, but like a woman of a hundred and thirty-three. Victory, Gabriel thought, not winged, but hobbling.
It was all very strange. He took a long breath and decided that after he was finished piling up the stripes and the bars, the Diplomatic service would have first call.
Chapter Five
THE PARTY STARTED fairly early that night. Normally shipboard protocol would have forbidden two parties one right after the other. But this situation was a little different, and the relief aboard-among both Star Force and marine staff-was so palpable that the captain gave her approval with very little trouble. Gabriel had one stop to make before the party. After giving it some consideration, he felt that the way to attract the least attention was to do exactly what he was supposed to be doing: delivering a message to someone in Engineering. Torine Meldrum down there was on his spatball team. He wrote her a note about the rescheduling of practice and then wrote eleven more notes to other teammates, slipping them into message boxes outside people's rooms or delivering them by hand to those he knew to be on duty. Additionally, he wrote one note not to a teammate, and as he passed by Jake on the way out of Engineering, he saw that Jake got it without anyone seeing.
Then he changed into his most formal uniform, getting ready to go to the signing celebration. When he came out of his room, there was a folded note in his own message box. He opened it. For the one who mentioned ghosts, said the note. Deliver unlabeled. Out of the note fell a little datachip: another message, encoded.
Gabriel, suddenly apprehensive, looked at it for a moment. All of this covert moving in the shadows and keeping secrets made him very uneasy, but he decided that he was only a low link on a long chain of authority. Surely his superiors knew what they were doing. So he went back to his desk, found an envelope into which he slipped the chip, then folded it down and activated the seal. The paper melted into itself, seamless. It was a matter of a few minutes to make his way downdecks to the second ambassador's quarters. She was not there, so Gabriel slipped the envelope into the slot of her message box and went off to the party, wondering what it had all been about.
The partying down in the reconverted main briefing room was unusually wild, at least by shipboard standards. There was a lot more singing than usual-at least what passed for singing-and the jokes were louder than normal. Everything, movement, talk, even the eating and drinking, had a slight edge about it. The edge of the sword just sheathed, Gabriel thought. Relief. He was feeling it himself. He was a marine and liked to fight, but there was something about this particular fight that he would have found distasteful. Maybe because I've become too familiar with the details. One part of his mind immediately resolved not to get involved with the details any more. Another part denounced the first one as a coward. To shut them both up, he headed over toward the bar where he heard at least one familiar voice. Big Mil from Callirhoe was standing there having a talk with Charles, who was in front of the bar for a change. Mil was looking very amused and slightly outraged, enough so that Gabriel suspected Charles had told Mil about the Squadron Special. Some of the spatball team began to appear as well when they saw Gabriel there. All had an eye to telling their team captain that he was a little too intense about what was supposed to be a sport.
"This is the second time you've rescheduled the meeting," Torine said, having arrived a little after coming off duty. "Can't we just sort this out when we do our normal five on five game at the weekend? Don't you think some of us have other concerns?"
"Of course he doesn't," Dietmar said, looming his blond self up from behind the bar. "In his own mind, we are all as conscientious and duty-struck as our little Gabe."
The others made various disgusting choking noises. Gabriel rolled his eyes. "All right, all right, all of you, it can wait until the weekend! But don't you want to beat the Starfies?" "Depends on how the money goes," someone muttered.
From around them, applause started. The group looked up and saw Delvecchio standing in the doorway– a little hesitant, almost shy. She wore a loose wine-colored robe of simple cut rather than the elegant attire she favored during the delegations. She came in, and the applause got louder. The marines and Star Force people assembled all clapped and cheered for her as they would have for a victorious captain newly returned from a successful campaign.
She took it graciously then went to sit down. A Star Force officer brought her a drink, and the partying started to get back into its normal mode. Gabriel, though, looked at Delvecchio, looked at her face, and was not entirely sure he liked what he saw.
Somebody tapped Gabriel on the shoulder. He turned, surprised. It was just Mil. He held out his hand.
"What?"
"Here."
Confused, Gabriel put his hand out. Mil dropped something black into it. "It's your luck thing," Gabriel said. "I know. I want you to have it." "Huh?"
"No, seriously, take it. I saw you were interested in it yesterday." "I can't take that; it's yours! Mil, really, don't. Tomorrow you'll be sorry."
"No, I won't. Oh, go on! I'm getting tired of the thing. It keeps getting in my way, and I've almost lost it a couple times this month anyway. Doesn't matter." He grinned. "The news just came through. I'm being discharged in a month. Back to home sweet Damrak. Gonna go home and pile me up some cash. No, really, Gabriel! Take it. Every ounce I have to ship home is going to cost me big credits. I'm letting almost everything go but my discharge clothes and a sack to carry home my back pay."
"But-"
Mil just shook his head, closed Gabriel's hand around the black stone, grinned at him, and walked off. Gabriel looked after him, opened his mouth to say something, and then was surprised and distracted by the flush of heat coming from the little thing. The faint glow was coming from inside the stone again, pulsing gently, and as he opened his hand again he saw that the warmth kept time with the light. "Isn't that pretty," said the little soft voice from off to one side. He looked up in surprise to see the ambassador standing beside him, looking curiously at what he held. "It's a life crystal of some kind, isn't it? I've heard of them, but I've never actually seen one." She poked it gently. He offered it to her, and Del-vecchio took it and cupped it in her hand, looking at the way it echoed her pulse. "Where did you get it?"
"Another of the marines gave it to me. Mil, over there. The big red-headed guy." Delvecchio nodded. "A few of the Verge worlds have these," the ambassador said. "It's some kind of slightly electroactive silicate, a natural 'chip,' apparently. There are beaches where you can pick them up by the thousands. Must be lovely at night." "But it only glows when you hold it."
"So it does," Delvecchio said and glanced around, handing the stone back to Gabriel without really looking. "Well, isn't everyone having a good time?"
Except you, Gabriel thought, but kept his peace as regarded that, even though the ambassador herself
was obviously making no particular attempt to look cheerful. "Yes, ma'am," Gabriel said.
She gave him a slightly sharp look. "You know," she said, "sometimes it's possible to be more observant
than is good for you. Well, not that I haven't been tempting you to that blessed state as it is," she sighed.
"I still wish I knew why this has happened now," Delvecchio said, very softly.
"What?" Gabriel said after a moment. He was still recovering from the odd little episode with Mil.
"Collusion," she said. "I said they had been talking to each other."
"You didn't tell me that."
"I wanted to see if you might pick it up yourself." Gabriel looked away in embarrassment.
"No," she said, very lightly touching his arm, "don't feel bad that you didn't. I wasn't too sure myself until someone very fortuitously brought me proof. It would have been a lucky guess, no more, until about an hour before we started. And there were other pieces of information that helped me." Her eyes glinted at him. "Anyway, you did very well today. Don't stop tomorrow when they have to go back."
iit t, ii
I wont.
"And as for me," Delvecchio said, "very early this morning we'll be returning for the signing ceremony." She sighed. "I'm sorry you won't be able to be there. It is likely to be too high-powered an event for me to indulge myself with your presence. Notice would be taken, which at the moment would be unwise. But after it's all over, I'll be coming back aboard to be ferried home again, and we'll have time to achieve closure on all this. I'll want to give you contact information for some people who'll be interested in, shall we say, this informal training period, when you get out of the service at last."
Gabriel shook his head, a little in disbelief, a little in gratitude. "Ma'am, you've gone to a lot of trouble for me."
"It's been mutual," Delvecchio said. "And people took this same kind of trouble for me once upon a time, when my career was new. This is my chance to pay the favor forward. I'll talk to you later in the week, then."
She walked away.
The rest of the party was not much different from the one that had preceded it. Gabriel left about midnight, headed for his quarters, stripped off, took a sober pill just in case-even though he had had very little to drink-and went to sleep.
Then there was thunder. The bombs falling, ending in a sudden flash of light. But they were not the usual bombs. Or rather, there was only one explosion instead of what had become almost a monotony of crashes and rumbles, and only one light. The screams he knew, but the voices were different, and the sound faded away almost immediately so that one irrationally calm and detached part of his mind said, air first, then vacuum: explosive decompression-One voice he heard that he recognized, though not from Epsedra. As the vacuum swallowed it he thought how strange it was to hear that serene, sedate voice cry out at something that, for once, for just this once, had surprised it. But that was wrong, that was impossible. A growing feeling of how wrong all this was, the wrongness shifting swiftly into horror, It wasn't like this, it wasn't-! And the light was all wrong too. Not the repeated flashes, but just one-fading, swiftly gone like the sound, with only the burning of ice and dying fire left. Gabriel fought for breath, but there was none, only ice in his lungs. Ice sheeting over burnt skin, ice clouding and clotting eyes that could no longer blink or see. He struggled, couldn't move, couldn't-
Gabriel flailed around among the bedclothes for a moment and found that there were no bombs, no ice, no fire, only someone pounding furiously on his door. And no light. He waved for it, staggered to his feet, opened the door.
There were two other marines there, people whom he knew slightly-security staff with sidearms. He
stared at them.
"What?"
"Get dressed, sir," one of them said, as if the word "sir" left a bad taste in his mouth, "and come with us." As quickly as he could Gabriel threw on his uniform, the everyday duty fatigues rather than the now wrinkled dress blues that he had tossed across the desk. He was slightly annoyed and more than a little uneasy that the two security soldiers stood in the doorway watching him the entire time. When he was ready, they took him by the arms, one on each side, and marched him to the Bridge. It was not a place where marines went all that often-even Gabriel, in his slightly privileged position, did not make a habit of going there. It was very much Star Force territory, and the two services were careful not to trespass on one another's preserves aboard ship. It was a long narrow room, heavily shielded, since it would be the first part of the ship that an enemy would fire at in combat. A dozen or more officers monitored various screens and holodisplays, occasionally entering commands by datapad or voice relay. Despite the buzz of activity, the entire Bridge was unusually silent, subdued. The few who spoke among themselves did so in whispers. In the middle of the long narrow corridor was the center seat. It was empty at the moment.
The straight slim shape in the Star Force uniform, standing in front of the center seat, turned to him.
Elinke Dareyev looked down from the slight eminence on which the seat rested, gazing down at Gabriel
with a face as still as that of a carved statue. She looked at him like someone who did not know him, had
never known him. It was a stranger's face on the body of a friend.
"Lieutenant Connor," she said, "do you know why you have been brought here?"
"Captain, I-I don't know what you're-"
She turned to her first officer. "Play it," she said and turned away from Gabriel to look at the holographic display platform.
The air above the platform curdled into light, settled into a view of Phorcys, the white-streaked dun of the planet turning beneath. Nothing happened in that view for a while. Then a streak of silver dropped into it. The view zoomed in closer to the gleaming shape. It was a dull white rectangular box with a wedge-shaped cockpit attached to the front. One of the Star Force shuttles, heading for the planet's surface. Down and down it dropped, sliding into the haze of atmosphere– –and then came the bloom of light, sudden and eye-hurting even against the new planetary day. Glitter. Bright sparks suddenly spangled Phorcys's dun and white face and tracked on past it, up into the starlit darkness of space past the planet's terminator. A tiny but disastrous meteor burned itself out in the cold, reducing itself slowly to tiny glittering points of shattered or molten metal.
Gabriel went first hot then deadly cold inside. A slight ringing started in his ears and his knees suddenly felt weak as the significance of who had been on the shuttle dawned on him.
"There were no survivors," said Captain Dareyev as the hologram faded. "The dead include Ambassador Lauren Delvecchio, Second Ambassador Areh Wuhain, diplomatic assistants Elle Masterton and Enrique Delrio; Marine Lieutenant Hal Quentin Rostrevor-Malone-"
Gabriel would have sunk into a crouch on the floor, if he could have, but his muscles would not obey him, not even as regarded something as simple and desirable as collapse. Even his weak knees seemed to have locked. Hal. What were you doing there? Hal! And the ambassador!
"You are known by the command of this ship to be affiliated with Concord Intelligence," said Elinke. "Various members of this ship's crew have confirmed that you were asking many questions regarding the shuttle crew and passenger dispositions this morning while such assignments were being made. Other members of the crew have confirmed seeing you delivering unspecified materials to personnel involved in the ongoing treaty negotiations."
"Captain," Gabriel said. Could she really be suggesting what he thought she was? "Please, let me explain! This is all a-"
"Lieutenant," said Captain Dareyev, "Second Lieutenant Lemke David was aboard that shuttle, performing as navigator."
Oh no, Gabriel thought, but his mouth was too dry to let the words out. His mind was suddenly blank. There was nothing to say. Again and again he saw the flash of light, the streak of white-hot fire descending into the atmosphere. Again he heard Delvecchio's surprised scream, then silence. "Remove him to custody," Captain Dareyev said. "He is to be held on suspicion of murder, pending the conduct of the investigation. Phorcys has claimed trial rights since the crime occurred in their atmospheric space. Since law begins with atmosphere, we have ceded trial rights to them. You will be transferred there tomorrow," she said. "The investigation is already under way. The trial will begin within three days."
She turned her back, standing very straight, very still. Her normally fair complexion was deathly pale in the dim lights of the Bridge.
The guards, other marines, hustled Gabriel away with the firm hands of men who are furious with shame, shame of their own, wishing they could rub that shame out… and unable to. Gabriel understood the feeling well enough, though from the inside.
The next few days shaded into one another in that strange kind of fugue experience that sometimes follows a great shock. Gabriel had undergone a similar experience after Epsedra: days in which time
seemed either to slow down to an imperceptible crawl or in which it suddenly advanced in lumps that Gabriel couldn't remember. And there was no way to tell when a day started or ended. He had gone from the barely perceptible "day" of Concord shipboard life with its light– and dark-cycles, to a permanent day inside a bare, white-walled, windowless cell deep within the bowels of some Phorcyn law enforcement facility.
Even contemplating escape was no particular comfort, for Phorcys was a cold, cheerless world, and Duma, the capital city, exemplified this. The few buildings that Gabriel had seen during his escort from the landing shuttle to the holding facility were all crafted from rounded, brown stone and black steel, all of them designed to be easily accessible and to retain heat. The architects had not taken beauty into consideration. The entire city had seemed to hug the ground in an effort to avoid the stinging, freezing curtains of sleet that sheeted down from the leaden roof of the sky. The streets were straight, narrow, and in need of a serious cleaning. The few ash-colored trees that he had seen were squat, leafless, and altogether bedraggled.
With nothing but a comfortless pallet and a sanitary bowl for company, Gabriel sat or lay about for those first few hours and did his best not to think. Whenever he tried to work things out in his mind, thought became suddenly drowned in a repetition of that bright flash of light, the scream suddenly silenced forever, and the strangely beautiful sparkling motes of debris as they dispersed into the upper atmosphere. The only other image he could conjure was Elinke's accusing, hate-filled stare. Everything within his cell was glarelessly but brilliantly lit, making restful sleep almost impossible. Food arrived in the cell fairly regularly, and Gabriel ate it more out of a sense of the need to keep himself nourished and alert than from any kind of enjoyment.
What also arrived fairly regularly were interrogators. Some of them were male and female officers from Star Force, some of them were marine, and some of them were Phorcyn. At first he had waited for them eagerly, looking forward to the chance to defend himself. Later, when he'd had some experience of how little any of them let him speak during any given session, Gabriel lost a lot of the eagerness. It was all so wearing, and they all asked the same questions over and over again. After the first day or so of giving the same answers over and over again, Gabriel started to realize that there was going to be no trial… at least not one with presumption of the defendant's innocence. The civilized practices of the Orion League, with its rigorous upholding of the citizen's rights, seemed a long way off now. He began to realize how much he could miss something that he had formerly taken for granted. Gabriel was on entirely the wrong side of the stellar nations for this case.
At least he had counsel, though he wasn't sure about what that was going to be worth. When he first saw the little man, all bundled up in the swathings of silk that were Phorcyn business wear, he was somewhat impressed. Dor Muhles looked smart, spoke well, and seemed like he might be of help. But Gabriel soon found that mostly what Muhles intended was to help Gabriel plead guilty. He was convinced of Gabriel's guilt and considered his defense a waste of time and taxpayers' money, though he avoided saying so directly. There was apparently some ethical constraint against it.
At least Muhles brought word to Gabriel once a day of the evidence against him as the investigation unfolded. The merely circumstantial material was sifted through first while the forensic work was still going on. Gabriel began to understand with a sinking heart how so many details of his behavior, which with Delvecchio alive would have seemed minor and unimportant, now looked damning: Gabriel's presence on the shuttles, the questions he had been asking, the people he had been watching so carefully. It all looked very suspicious, if one were already convinced that Gabriel had been up to something. The
worst of it was that not one of the investigators or interrogators seemed even slightly interested in the interchange with Jake, no matter how many times Gabriel reminded them that this was his Intelligence connection aboard ship. The captain had to know about him.
Then, around the fourth day of the investigation, the forensic data began to filter in, along with eyewitness testimony to support it. The second ambassador had made a note of the chip she received– though not of its contents-in her dispatch to the Grid-based diplomatic network. Her last dispatch, as it turned out. What its contents had been, the dispatch did not say, merely that it was in her possession. Meanwhile, sweeps of the area of space with ramscoop-based "sniffers" had picked up traces of clathrobutinol, a high-yield explosive used in some mining and manufacturing processes. Taggant analysis on the explosion remnants had begun at once, but at the moment the provenance of the explosive was of secondary importance. Much more important was the fact that when searches were conducted, small packets of the same explosive were found in all of Falada 's other shuttles, cleverly hidden near their drivecores in such a way as to pass for auxiliary fuel rods. Each of them was carrying a "receiver" chip similar to the message chip that the second ambassador had been carrying. The implication was clear enough. With all the shuttles rigged to explode in the presence of the proper trigger at the proper height above atmosphere, it wouldn't matter which of them the second ambassador– and almost certainly, her superior-were on. The result would be the same. And the trigger was the chip that Jake had given to Gabriel, the chip that Gabriel in turn had given the second ambassador. Gabriel had been duped into murdering them all. Hal, Lem, Delvecchio, all the others. Despair and rage warred within him, despair at the dawning certainty that he had little hope of proving his innocence, rage in knowing that the true perpetrators of the crime were still out there, still free, and very likely to get away with it.
It's not murder if I didn't mean it, said the space lawyer in the back of his brain. Manslaughter … But manslaughter was bad enough, especially when the slaughtered included his best friend, a good acquaintance, and the ambassador. The question now remained whether the Phorcyns would kill him for it or simply confine him for the rest of his life.
"They gave you the benefit of the doubt," Muhles said as they were preparing to go to court the first day. "They let the investigation go for five days. Originally I thought they were going to stop at three." "Nice of them," Gabriel said, as they and what seemed a squadron of guards came out of the barren, windowless corridor leading from his cell. After passing through a heavily guarded security gate, they proceeded into a sealed bay somewhere in the prison facility. Waiting for them was a sleek and windowless flitter. Two guards, Muhles, and Gabriel climbed into it, and its door slammed shut. Gabriel could not find another word to say all the way to court. The word murderer kept echoing in his brain, blotting other thought out.
The courtroom to which they were finally escorted was unusually beautiful, at least on the inside. High– ceilinged and airy, the room had smooth walls of pale stone and even a thick rug or tapestry here or there. To Gabriel it seemed most beautiful because it had windows. Four tall, narrow windows faced each other along the walls, each slightly concave and tapering to a sharp point near the top. He could look out them and see daylight. The wrong color, he started to think, and then rejected the thought. The light of any star falling through genuine atmosphere, however pale and cold, looked good to him now. Some faint childhood memory of his father reading an old piece of poetry came to Gabriel, a fragment of a line:… maketh the light of the sun to fall on the good and the evil alike … He sat there, looking at the thin watery sunlight of Phorcys coming down through its blue-green sky, and had no particular doubts
about in which category the inhabitants of this courtroom had filed him.
The courtroom was crowded, mostly with Phorcyns. Besides the various legal personnel that crowded the upper court, a parade of journalists with their holographic imagers filled the cushionless pews. They were surprisingly quiet, talking in whispered murmurs amongst themselves. A small group of Star Force and marine legal officers sat stone-faced just in front of the crowd of journalists. In front of them, a cordon of braided ropes hanging between brass stands separated several rows of seats behind both the prosecution and defense tables. Upon these seats sat the witnesses who had been called to testify for the proceedings. Behind the prosecution sat a crowd of Star Force and marine personnel, some of whom Gabriel knew, but who nevertheless refused to look at him directly. Sprinkled among them were four or five Phorcyns whom Gabriel thought he recognized as members of the delegation from the peace talks. The area set aside for witnesses for the defense was empty.
Three judges looked down from the podium, a stark affair with three steps built of stone of different colors-symbolic, his defense counsel had told him, of guilt, innocence, and uncertainty, the last being the "initial state of the universe" according to some old Phorcyn myth. That was about the most useful information that Gabriel received from his defense counsel that day. Muhles seemed perfectly content to sit unquestioning and listen as the Phorcyn prosecution counsel, a tall and handsome woman with short, shaggy golden-red hair, called her witnesses one after another. The forensic evidence was presented, and various eyewitnesses were called. This included many marines-Mil and others from the party, and numerous Star Force personnel who had been assisting Hal with the work on the shuttles and the piloting of them on the day of the final negotiations between Phorcys and Ino. All, though some of them very unwillingly, admitted that Gabriel had been on numerous shuttles during the day, that he had had time alone in each of them over the course of the day, and that he had seemed eager to get on all the shuttles he could. Then excerpts of Gabriel's testimony to the interrogators were read, page after page. It seemed that Phorcyn law did not allow the accused to make a statement until the end of the trial, the rationale for this apparently was that no one could rebut until all the evidence had been presented. His own testimony seemed to Gabriel to have little effect. By the day's end it seemed obvious even to Gabriel that he must have been up to something. And right through everything, Muhles sat quietly and just let it all unfold. "When are you going to ask them something or cross-question somebody?" Gabriel demanded on the way back to the prison.
"Tomorrow, perhaps. It's not the right time yet."
"Yeah, well I'd like to get a second opinion on that. I want another counsel. What do I do to start the process of getting one?"
Muhles blinked at that, bemused. "You've already briefed counsel. Taking the time to do that again would hold up the trial, and the judges will never permit that. Besides, the court would never approve the extra expense."
"What price justice," Gabriel muttered to himself and to the white walls of his cell later that night. The cell where they kept him was warm enough, even without the shapeless one-piece coverall the prison officials had issued him-they had absolutely refused to allow him to keep his marine uniform, possibly through fear of his committing suicide by swallowing the buttons. He was being fed well enough, though the food was desperately tasteless. He longed for one of the meatrolls that he had been so unconsciously stuffing in his face only a week ago. The cell lacked even the minimum entertainment or Grid connections that most enlightened worlds would have allowed a prisoner. Gabriel, though, suspected he was himself most likely the entertainment for someone, somewhere. The room was
certainly monitored, though he couldn't see how. Somewhere, he thought, people are betting on which way this trial will go. Maybe even some of my shipmates …
The thought made Gabriel wince. He rolled over on the hard, white pallet-bed and stared at the bright ceiling. He had heard not a word from any marine aboard Falada, or anyone else for that matter, since he had been put on the shuttle and brought down here. Was he being held incommunicado? Or was it simply that no one aboard Falada wanted to have anything to do with him now? Or that Elinke wouldn't let them? It was within a captain's powers to approve or deny communications offship to her crew if she felt there was "good and sufficient reason." And from her point of view, there was more than enough reason. Oh, Lem. Poor Lena. And poor Elinke. A shiver of sound came from down the hall.
Gabriel's head came up. The soundproofing was not as perfect in here as they thought it was. One set of footsteps he could clearly hear: the usual security guard who patrolled this wing of the facility. But there was also another sound. More footsteps? But the rhythm was strange, and the footfalls were very light. The door opened. Gabriel stood up. That much courtesy at least he owed whoever might be turning up to see him. Well, not owed, but he was a marine, and some habits died hard.
The door slid open. The security guard was visible through it. He was looking peculiarly at Gabriel.
After a moment, he stepped aside.
And a fraal came stepping into Gabriel's cell.
The experience was momentarily so bizarre that Gabriel was aware of simply standing there with his mouth hanging open like a mindless thing as he and the fraal looked at each other. "I greet you, young human," said the fraal in a soft, breathy little voice.
"Greeting and honor to you as well," Gabriel said in passable fraal. His accent was probably hideous, but he and all his classmates had all the basic species greetings hammered endlessly into them in Academy, and no matter how bad his situation was at the moment, it was not so bad that he could not be polite. She was tall for a fraal, perhaps about five foot four, and very slender-limbed and delicately built. The initial impression of frail age was strengthened somewhat by the look of the single fall of silky, silver– gilt hair that she wore in a tail hanging from the back of her head-it was starting to come in dark at the roots. Slightly incongruous was the fire-blue satin skin jumpsuit she was wearing, a fashion possibly better suited to a First World's capital world rather than a jail cell on a planet in the Verge. But it set off her pearly skin impressively and highlighted her large, pupilless sapphire blue eyes. The overall effect was of elegant old age. Gabriel half expected to smell lavender.
What is it with me and older women lately? Gabriel thought, in some bemusement, then instantly shied
away from the thought. The memory of Delvecchio, of that proud fierce life snuffed out, and (however
inadvertently) at his hands, was too tender to bear much scrutiny at the moment.
The fraal had been looking Gabriel up and down as well for that moment or so. Now she turned to the
Phorcyn security guard and said, "Thank you. You may leave us."
"Can't leave you alone with him, madam," said the guard.
The fraal looked at him mildly. "What will we do together, he and I, when you are gone?" she said. "Tunnel our way out? Fly through the ceiling? You have scanned me inside and out and have taken my satchel. You have taken everything from him but his garment, which I much doubt he will remove to hang himself with while I am here. I think you might go off to the surveillance room and listen to our every word from there, where you can sit in comfort and have something hot to drink at the same time.
Now depart, and return in ten minutes."
The guard blinked at that. He opened his mouth to object, and the fraal tilted her head and gave him a look that suggested to Gabriel (and perhaps to the guard) that this was in the nature of an intelligence test. After a moment the guard shrugged and went away, and the door slid shut. "Will you sit down, lady?" Gabriel said, standing up rather belatedly.
"I will stand for the moment," said the fraal. "At my age, I do not sit down unless I intend to stay that way for some time."
"Uh, all right," Gabriel said and sat down again, not arguing the point, though there was something in the tone of her voice that made Gabriel think this fraal might be joking with him. "I have come, young human," said the fraal, "with intent to do you a service, perhaps. If you will allow it."
Gabriel looked at her, shook his head. "I don't understand."
"Understanding is overrated," said the fraal mildly. "Much useful information is missed by those who seek answers too assiduously, at the expense of what else they might find along the road." "If understanding is overrated, then I should be going way up in your esteem right now," said Gabriel. "But how can I help you?"
"The turn of speech is human-cultural," said the fraal. "I know what is more on your mind at the moment is that you are the one in need of help."
Gabriel had to grin ruefully at that. "It does seem likely that I am about to be convicted of either murder
or manslaughter," he said.
"Are you guilty of either?" said the fraal.
Gabriel looked at her in shock, such shock that he could say nothing.
"Wise," she said. "Silence holds more than merely secrets. Young human, tell me: when you leave here, what will you do?"
"Leave here!" Gabriel shook his head. "At the rate things are going, I doubt I will, except for a larger facility of the same kind, for a long stay or a short one."
She tilted her head, looked at him thoughtfully. "You mean you have no further plans?"
"No, I-excuse me." Gabriel felt his manners beginning to wear a little thin. "What exactly do you want
with me?"
"Another four minutes," said the fraal and blinked slowly, twice, a meditative gesture. After a moment, she said, "Tell me why you think you are here."
"Because a lot of people died," Gabriel said, wondering why he was even bothering to answer her questions. Who was she? Where did she come from, what did she want, what was she doing here? "And they think I did it."
"You have killed people before," said the fraal.
"In the line of duty," Gabriel said, "yes. I am a soldier. Soldiers often kill people." He paused for a
moment and said, "Honored, I don't know a lot of the fraal language. But does that language distinguish
between 'killing' and 'murder'?"
She looked at him for a few moments. "Yes," she said.
"I have murdered no one," Gabriel said.
She made the slow side-to-side rocking of the head that Gabriel knew from the fraal who had lived near his family on Bluefall meant "yes," or "I understand." Footsteps outside.
"Ah," said the fraal.
The door opened. There was the security guard. "I thank you," the fraal said to him, and turning back to Gabriel, she made a little bow to him. Sitting, completely confused, he bowed back. "Perhaps again," she said, and pursed her thin little lips in a smile. Then she went out the door. The door closed.
Gabriel sat there, opened his mouth and closed it again, trying to make something-anything-of the past few minutes. Finally he gave up, trying to accept it as an interesting interval in what would otherwise have been a miserable evening.
All the same, when he finally got to sleep, the sleep was more uneasy even than it would have been, for the darkness that watched him in his dreams had an unnerving sense of sapphire blueness about it.
Chapter Six
HIS COUNSEL CAME to pick him up the next morning, and together they went back to the courtroom. Gabriel prepared himself for another long and uncomfortable day of little jabs of pain, one after another, as friends and acquaintances testified against him. What he had not been prepared for was the first name called after the court came back into session. "Captain Elinke Dareyev."
She walked to the little separate platform where witnesses stood and stepped up, looking out at the judges and nowhere else.
"Captain Elinke Dareyev," said the prosecutor, stepping up to stand before her, "do you swear by your oaths of office to tell the truth?" "I swear," Elinke said.
"Thank you," said the prosecutor. "You have heard the transcript of the testimony of the accused, concerning his claim that he was acting on the instructions of a fellow Intelligence officer, one Jacob Ricel."
"Yes," Elinke said.
"What is your reaction to that testimony?"
"That Jacob Ricel is not known to me as a Concord Intelligence operative," Elinke said.
Gabriel flushed hot and cold and hot again. His first thought was, But she has to have known. She's the
captain. Is she lying because I killed Lem? Is this simply revenge?
No answer to that one, but the other possibility also had to be considered: that she was telling the truth. I knew I'd been duped.
I plainly haven't realized how thoroughly I've been duped.
But now his brain was spinning with questions. If he wasn't Intelligence, then how did he know that I was? Have I been "sold off as a slightly used intelligence asset? And who "sold" me, and why, and why wasn't I told, and … and …
He pulled himself back to the moment. It was hard, nearly as hard as having to look at Elinke, standing there like a statue, elegant in black and silver, speaking levelly, looking at the judges but not at Gabriel. Never at him.
"You're quite sure of that?" the prosecutor said.
"Quite sure," Elinke said.
"Thank you, Captain." The prosecutor turned to glance at Muhles. Muhles made the graceful gesture with his hands that Gabriel was beginning to recognize as meaning "I have no questions," or in his case, "Who cares? Let's just get this over with."
Captain Dareyev stepped down and as she walked out of the courtroom, threw Gabriel one glance, just a single look, like a knife.
She was gone from the room, and it suddenly all became too much for Gabriel. He leaped up out of his seat and shouted at the judges, "I want another counsel! This is a farce, I'm being framed here-" A restraining field immediately shimmered up around him, glued him in place, and slowly pushed him down onto his cold stone bench seat again. The centermost judge looked thoughtfully at Gabriel and said, "Expression of violent tendencies and sentiments in the court is not permitted. The prisoner will be returned to his cell and may listen to the proceedings from there."
And so it was done. Gabriel went back without even the dubious company of Muhles. He spent that afternoon listening to the testimony pile up against him. When the prosecution had finished, he heard Muhles's voice lifted to address the court for the first time (and the last, Gabriel suspected; as he understood the Phorcyn legal process, sentencing would follow shortly after). It would normally be the time when Gabriel would have been allowed to make a statement, and he was still swearing bitterly at himself for not having held onto his composure for just a few moments longer.
… when he stopped, and listened, uncomprehending at first, and then finding himself meshed in a rising tangle of emotion as immobilizing as the restraint field had been, but much more involved and painful. For Muhles was reading into the record the text of his Valor decoration, the record of what had happened at Epsedra.
"-while under extensive enemy bombardment, Second Lieutenant Connor led his men up out of the crevasse in Autun Glacier in which they had been trapped, set up a barrage of covering fire directed at the emplacement that had been mortaring them from the nearby mountainside, and maintained that covering fire while his squad escaped down into the strengthened position occupied by Five Squad and took refuge there. Second Lieutenant Connor might then have followed them to cover, but instead attacked upslope toward the emplacement with mass grenades, seriously damaging it and causing it to cease firing until several minutes before the arrival of the relieving troops under-" Hearing it read in these circumstances, it was all as if it had happened to someone else. For the first time in Gabriel couldn't remember how long, there was no immediate memory of the fire, the ice, the dripping water and the gnawing cold. Only the words "-and was himself wounded, but continued to attack while-" suddenly brought something he had not felt for a while: the biting pain just under his right ribs. Strange how at the time it had felt more like a gas pain than anything else, and he had dismissed it at first. Only when Gabriel's buddies stared at him in horror and made him lie down did he realize what had happened to him. The shock had hit Gabriel badly, then, and a bizarre sense that to have half your liver blown out of you was somehow intrinsically unfair.
"-for courage under fire," said Muhles, and Gabriel was hard put, even now, not to snort. At the time, courage had had nothing to do with it. He was just doing what he had to, and it would not help him now. –and then Muhles's voice again, pleading for clemency for a man once brave, once a good marine, but now clearly gone insane. Gabriel sat there shaking his head.
"Sentencing," said the judge, "will take place tomorrow." And someone rang the soft-toned bell that meant court was done for the day.
Gabriel sat nearly unmoving in the cell for much of the rest of that day, then lay awake all that night as might have been expected, but possibly not for the normal reasons. Strangely, slowly, those reasons began to change as the bright white hours went by. Once again Gabriel found himself wondering about the ambassador's question, possibly in order to avoid thinking about everything else. But the question still had no answer. Why have they chosen to settle now?
The immediate answer suggested itself: collusion. They got caught cooperating in an illegality, and maybe they knew they were about to get caught. So they rolled over, allowed themselves to be shepherded into this agreement. . . "forced" into it.
But the ambassador's voice came through as sharply in Gabriel's mind as if she had still been alive to make the retort. That might serve for analysis on the upper decks. I expect better of you. He bowed his head, unable to think of anything better … for the moment.
See what you've done to me? he said to her unquiet ghost. Now I will never be able to let it be until I know the answer. No answer came.
And there were other questions that he would never let be, either. Why are they doing this to me?
Either Elinke had told the truth, and Jake was not Intelligence, which meant someone had sold him up the river… or she was lying. And she was selling him up the river. It's not fair. I only did what I was told. But by whom?
He let out a small, bitter breath of laughter.
No matter. I did what I was told. And now I'm going to pay for it.
And not one of them will lift a finger to help me.
They were going to let Gabriel take the fall. There was no question of it. And he had nothing but his own stupidity to blame. What made me think it was safe to give that information to Jake? he thought. He wasn't in my chain of command. Yeah, but we 're supposed to cooperate.
When ordered. Yes. But you got creative, you thought you knew better. He scowled at the floor. Too much time spent talking to ambassadors, too much time thinking that you were able to make this kind of decision.
Wasted. You're sunk now. It's all over.
He rolled over in the white light, buried his head in his arms, and wished the night of ice and fire had been his last one.
The next morning Muhles, looking subdued, came for him, and they went to the courtroom without speaking a word to one another. They took their seats along with the various court officers and the courtroom teams from Star Force and the Marines. After a few minutes, the judges came in and mounted the three-stepped podium.
"Now is the time of verdicts," said the centermost judge. "Let judgment in the case of the Republican Union of Phorcys versus Gabriel Connor be revealed."
Each of them reached inside his robes, a movement that for one wild moment made Gabriel think they were going for weapons. But instead they came out with short colored rods, and each laid a rod on the
stone table.
"Guilty," said the center judge, laying down a white rod. "Guilty but with mitigating circumstances," said the second, laying down a gray rod.
"Dissenting," said the third, pushing a white rod across the table before him, "not proven." An intake of breath was heard in the room, and then silence, with some of the Star Force and marine officers looking at each other in confusion or anger.
"The dissension is noted," said the first judge. "A lack of majority opinion means that the case is hung. No resolution is achieved." He looked at Gabriel. "The prisoner is free to go, bearing his weight of guilt or innocence as best he may." Free to go? How? Gabriel.
"We wish to appeal this decision!" the head of the Star Force courtroom team immediately said. "You have no right of appeal on this world," said the center-most judge, looking like someone who was enjoying what was now happening. "When you granted us jurisdiction over this case, you accepted our right of disposition as binding and final. This man is free."
"But not innocent," said the Star Force officer, hanging onto his temper, but only just. "We require that he be remanded to Star Force custody to undergo court-martial for the criminal manslaughter of-" "When this man chooses to leave our sovereignty," said the first judge, apparently enjoying this more and more, "you may seize him if you can. For the time being, this system remains a free system, not directly responsible to any stellar nation or defense force under Concord control. And for the time being, while we remain free-" there was a hint of bitterness there– "we will not extradite sentient beings on our territory to Concord forces without due process. Such due process, under our law, has been undertaken and completed. Gabriel Connor," the judge said to him, frowning, "you may go." But where can I go? he thought. It did not seem like a good time to cry that question aloud, though, no matter how much he might feel like it. He stood up and waited, looking around for someone to give him a cue.
Muhles simply bowed to him and then walked off, leaving him there.
The shock of that was considerable. Gabriel could do nothing for the moment but stand and watch. Around him, with a slight hum and bustle that somehow sounded almost disappointed, the courtroom started to empty. Only one person approached him. A marine officer whom Gabriel did not know separated himself from his comrades and walked very stiffly to where Gabriel stood. He handed Gabriel an envelope, then moved hurriedly away from him.
Gabriel ran his finger down the envelope. It unsealed itself. He reached in, removed his ID, his banking card, and a chit to submit for the return of his personal effects. He then took out the other object in the envelope, a little datacart, and put his thumbnail to the quick-read slot. The words started to flow by across the surface of the cart. Dishonorable discharge . .. forfeiture of pay, forfeiture of pension, forfeiture of travel rights … And then another block of text. On entry to any world or space of full Concord membership, having committed acts for which you have not yet been tried in Concord space, you are liable to seizure and trial on the charges of murder, criminal manslaughter, sabotage, terrorist acts, and transfer of secure or classified information to or from persons not qualified to handle that information, the penalties for which are as follows . . .
So much for the idea of going home, Gabriel thought, and looked up. He was as good as an outlaw once he crossed out of the Verge. And meanwhile he had some money but not much, and it wouldn't last for
long. When you were a marine, you had a family that took care of you, fed you, paid you enough to have something to spend on leave and something to put by, and eventually turned you loose into the rest of the world with skills that were worth something in the employment market. But now that "virtual" family was gone, and there was no hope of his own family being able to help him. If his father would even want to help a disgraced man, a cashiered marine, a possible murderer and traitor. The courtroom was empty when he looked up again.
Slowly Gabriel walked out the way he had seen the others go: out into a large airy corridor, pillared with stark sleek pillars on both sides, and toward an arch that contained two tall, black steel doors. He pushed one of the doors open, stepped outside.
A cold wind bit into him. Flakes of stinging snow drifted by on it. Reaching down from the doorway was a flight of steps that led to a wide, bare street; small ground vehicles were shooting up and down it, going about their business. On the far side of the street was a broad field, a park perhaps, streaked with old dirty snow. Beyond the park were low-roofed, indistinct buildings stretching off to a murky horizon of cloud and low dun-colored mountains. Cloud was coming in. The lucent blue-green of the sky of days past, glimpsed through a window, was now returning to the leaden gray that he had seen on the day of his landing. A high whine pierced the air off to one side where there was a parking lot that seemed to be doing double duty as a landing pad. He brought his head up sharply and saw a small spacecraft, a midnight and silver Star Force shuttle, lifting into the air, up and away, up and into the grayness, out toward the clean dark of space. Leaving him behind.
It was as good a description of his situation as any. This was going to be his world from now on, a world in which he would have to learn to be alone.
"It's true what they say about marines then, that they're made of stone or steel?" said the soft breathy voice, very suddenly, from behind him. "How you can bear weather like this, otherwise, I cannot tell." He turned around. The blue-eyed fraal was standing beside him, looking out at the increasingly murky day with distaste.
Gabriel could only stare at her for a few moments. Then, "What do you want with me?" he said. Right now, anyone who wanted anything to do with me must have a reason. And maybe not one I'd like. "To trust me?" she said and then stopped. "No. There is no reason for that. You do not know me. Perhaps then…" She tilted her head a little. "I simply ask you to come with me," said the fraal. Gabriel looked at her for a long time while the wind blew harder and the snow kept streaking by. At last he said the only thing he felt he had the strength left to say. "Why?"
She looked at him. "Because there is nothing else left for you to do," she said. Gabriel looked at her, shook his head. "I don't even know your name."
She reached out and took him by the hand. "Enda," she said as she led him off down the street, out of sight of the court building, out of earshot of the diminishing whine of the last shuttle leaving, and away from Elinke Dareyev, the marines, and all the rest of Gabriel's world.
The office was windowless. Upper Director UU563 56VIW Sander Ranulfsson could have had a real window if he'd wanted one, but there had been times when a view would have distracted him from what he should have been doing. That was not something he could afford at the moment. It would have suggested a desire to be seen exercising his power: a weakness, a self-indulgence, likely to prove provocative to the numerous spy and non-spy underlings who were watching his every move out here so closely. That kind of suggestion was something that, right now, UU563 56VIW did not need. Later it would be useful and would put exactly the wrong idea into exactly the right heads. Then, in the fullness of time, heads would roll. But right now the suggestion of that particular weakness would be premature and would mean that some other bait would have to be substituted.
So for now Sander sat in the windowless office with its softly glowing white walls and glanced up at the far wall, momentarily showing a view down on the muddy, ruddy splendor of Hydrocus as it turned and shone in the light of the F2 sun Corrivale. The green secondary planet Grith climbed over the limb of its parent, making UU563 56VIW frown. Miserable mudball, Sander thought, eyeing those parts of Grith where he knew the trouble lay. It just went to show you how much could go wrong with even the purest vision of the future, how even the best laid plan could develop complications that no one had ever expected.
Like this last week, for example.
He glanced at the watch on his finger. Another hour until Himself called. Just as well. Sander very much wanted that extra time to get his thoughts in order. The day had been good for him so far, but this discussion was likely to be a little rugged, for matters had very much gotten out of hand. UU563 56VIW stopped himself from even thinking the name. Not that anyone around here was a mindwalker, of course not. "Rogue" loose-mind talents like that tended not to go with the VoidCorp mindset, or if they turned up they were winnowed out, encapsulated, or the contractees' contracts terminated in short order. But some of the new software that was being mooted in the less crowded division meetings, lately-well, it made you think. Or rather it made you stop thinking and start watching very closely what for a long time had been the last bastion of privacy. Well, UU563 56VIW thought as he leaned back in his chair, privacy's an overrated state, anyway. If you're in private, how can anyone check on you to see that the work's getting done?
The Mudball rotated serenely "beneath" him, a virtual view from one of the Company's communications satellites. It had been a pleasure for VoidCorp to see to it, years back, that this system finally got a stable platform for the eyes it wanted to have looking down on Grith and other worlds in the Corrivale system. This also gave the Company its all-important "overhead." You could do very little in this world without adequate intelligence.
Sander began to sweat just slightly, since that was most likely what would be the main concern of this morning's conversation with Himself.
Now it was true that WX994 and so on was probably no more cruel to UU563 56VIW than he was to anyone else with lower digits, better than acceptable performance, and a slow but steady motion upward in the corporate scheme of things. He would normally be watching Sander closely, as Sander in turn watched closely the S's and T's milling around below him in this particular arena of operations. And maybe "arena" was a better word than usual in this context. The only difference from the games of ancient times was that there was no cheering crowd, or rather, no one whose function was specifically to be entertained by the furiously enacted antagonisms taking place in the board rooms or out "in the field." There was some entertainment in watching the mighty above you fall, of course, or the inept below you being torn out of comfortable positions by their own underlings, but you dared not laugh too hard. Between one breath and another, someone might decide to make an example of you, since after all we were all supposed to be one big happy corporate Family. It simply did not do to betray too much division or antagonism where outsiders might just possibly see. Pull together or be pulled apart separately. It was a fact of life, and in some cases, of death.
Sometimes the death did not happen, and that could prove troublesome unless you had a quick excuse ready. Sander had been working on this one for the past several days with the intention of putting old WX off his tail for a while. Others had not been watching their own tails closely enough and were about to pay the price.
He looked down again at Grith as it circled Hydrocus and shook his head. The place had been a nuisance to the company for a hundred and fifty years or so now, since burgeoning powers like the Hatire and the StarMech Collective turned up in the Corrivale system and tried to take its advantages right out from under the Company's nose. As if mere prior claim was good enough reason to exploit something! There had been a more rugged time, when the CA 319 had come swaggering through the system, first of the great VoidCorp freebooters, and had bombed the Hatire settlement at Diamond Point on Grith back into the stone age which it had barely exited. Those were the days, Sander thought rather longingly. When you could roam the spaceways and take whatever you were strong enough to take. Life had settled down a bit since then. With the Concord starting to walk high and wide all over the Verge, with the great stardriver Lighthouse likely to turn up at any moment full of Concord Administrators with itchy gavels and Concord marines with itchy trigger fingers, and with heavy cruisers of who knew which stellar nation likely to pop in to see what they might extract from the local yokels, well, the time of freebooting was done. Now VoidCorp had to manage its corporate affairs in ways that did not attract quite so much attention.
It was hard to do this, though, when so many others played unfair, especially the company's own employees. For no sooner had the first of the Concord ships, Monitor, come back to this space a few years ago than the initial surveys found a bloody great colony of goggly, eight-eyed sesheyans living on Grith. Worse yet, they claimed that they'd always lived there, brought there by the alien race whose ruins were still to be found scattered through the moon's jungles.
Now this was patently nonsense, because the Compact had been negotiated with the sesheyans right back in 2274, and it said perfectly clearly that in exchange for the benefits of technology and the ability to leave their own planet, the sesheyans became VoidCorp Employees in perpetuity. You could not ignore that kind of language in a contract just because you were a mere thousand light-years away! It was ridiculous even thinking about it. But here was a colony of a hundred thousand sesheyans sitting on Grith and defying their rightful employers. And the Concord actually bought the ridiculous story about an alien transfer in the deeps of time. It should have been obvious to anyone with even the brains of a weren that the Grith-based sesheyans had somehow taken advantage of the chaos of the Second Galactic War to elope from their contracts and set up here as scions of a fake alien civilization. But Ari Madhra, the Concord Administrator ruling on the case, bought into the myth and declared the colony independent, an "indigenous race." It obviously wasn't an independent or unbiased judgment. Sander often wondered who had gotten to her and for how much. Someone should have outbid them, ideally the Company. The knowledge that they had not done so made UU563 56VIW think the unthinkable, that someone at a very high level had messed up.
But now Sander sat looking down at Grith and keeping himself busy with the company's business here, which was to find a way to bring these runaway sesheyans back into the fold. The company's long-term strategy indicated perhaps fifty to a hundred years of slow pressure exerted both on Grith itself and on the planets trading with it, wherever they might be, as well as more concrete pressure on the Concord, on Administrators old and new, and on the higher reaches of power in all stellar nations to rescind the old
decision or to "re-evaluate" the situation with an eye to making a new one. Slow and steady would win this race. The point was to do nothing too precipitate, to let the sesheyans toughing it out here learn that conditions were much better for their brothers who were in the blessed state of Employment and that attempting to make a go of it by themselves in this system where there was so much competition from other sources just wasn't going to work for them. Time would make the difference, and the Company had plenty of that.
In the meantime, Sander was allowed some leeway to implement short-term solutions that were estimated to have a better than two percent chance of increasing the speed of the fifty-to-a-hundred year plan without otherwise being of detriment to it. The Company saw no reasons why the non-Employee sesheyans on and near Grith shouldn't experience personally how difficult, how foolish it was, to attempt to take on a stellar nation single-handed, especially when they were in the wrong. The "free implementation" exercises also gave local Employees a chance to demonstrate their usefulness and resourcefulness to the Company.
Or for them to help shake themselves out if they're incompetent, UU563 56VIW thought. Well, that was one thing he definitely was not. This present business was sticky, but he would find his way through it and out the other side. And when he did-
"Sir," his assistant's voice came out of the air, "QI440 76RIC is waiting to speak to you." "Let him wait a few minutes," Sander said, almost in a growl, as he settled himself back in his chair. "He's lucky I don't have him sent to Iphus with nothing but a pail and shovel and let him find his own beach chair."
His assistant broke carrier without saying anything further. Wise, for Sander was in a foul mood about QI140. It would have been such a subtle piece of work, UU563 56VTW thought bitterly. Subtlety was somewhat out of fashion at VoidCorp, mostly for lack of anyone in the place who would recognize it if it ran up and bit him or her in the knee while wearing a T-slick reading FIRST GALACTIC CONCORD SUBTLETY IDENTIFICATION CHALLENGE. That the work probably would not have been recognized for what it was for a year or two didn't bother Sander overly. He had enough other projects in hand to keep him busy, and then he could have been pleasantly "taken by surprise" by the praise and advancement that would inevitably have followed. Instead he would have to duck and cover and pretend that none of it had ever happened, but that was unavoidable. Nothing was worse than failure, except for the identification of failure and the publicizing of it afterwards.
And why shouldn't he have a little? UU563 56VTW thought furiously. "All right," he said to the air, "put him through."
A human shape appeared in the air before him, standing slightly off the floor. Sander resolved one more
time to have the engineering people up to do something about the projector's focus. He was tired of
having to compensate for it. The hologram hovered there looking somewhat uncertain. The figure was in
shadow, probably in a private booth, and his face was indistinct because of the lighting and its
combination with the cryptography programming.
"Well?" UU563 56VIW said. "What haye you got to say for yourself?"
"The asset you were concerned about has been neutralized," said the man hanging in the air.
"Will you speak in language that other human beings can understand for a change?" Sander said. "For
'Corp's sake, what's all this hardware and software for if we can't communicate securely? What do you
want to do, scribble it on a notepad and send it to me by some passing infotrader? Did you kill the asset,
or what?"
"No," said the man, "but he's dead all the same." "If you didn't kill him, who did?" "He had an accident."
"I'm not going to tell you again, if you don't just say-"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you, he had an accident," the other man said, just briefly furious, or as
much so as he dared to be. "Nothing prepared. Something to do with his e-suit."
"What?"
"His e-suit gave out on him. There was an accident aboard the ship, some kind of explosive decompression. He either suited up too fast and missed a gasket somewhere, or the e-suit just failed from lack of maintenance. They're still investigating it."
"Are they?" Sander said, sitting up a little straighter at that. "Any unusual attention to the matter from up above?"
"Nothing that our sources were able to identify."
"All right." Sander sat back. "Maybe it's for the best. Anyway, it might throw them off. It sure throws me off. Meanwhile, what about our others aboard? Any news from the lost lamb?" "Not a word. He took his discharge chit and walked, apparently." "Alone?"
"No. He's with a fraal." "What fraal?"
"No one knows. They're trying to work up some intelligence now."
Sander sat tight-lipped for the moment and considered the likelihood that intelligence was the one thing these people would never work up, no matter how much information they managed to find. "What's he doing? He leave the system yet?"
"Just sitting there at the moment. Probably in shock, they say."
"Huh. He would've been a lot more shocked if he'd kept going the way he was going," Sander said. "No matter. I want to make sure that he stays well away from you know where. In particular, I want to know the minute he leaves the system. One move toward Corrivale and I want to know all about it. It might seem harmless, might be just a transit, but I don't want anyone second-guessing me until he actually leaves Corrivale system for somewhere else. And even then I want him tagged and trailed for a good long time, him and his fraal both. Who is that fraal? Has someone sent him help we don't know about?" "They're working on it."
Sander wanted to growl again, but restrained himself. "There's only one other thing I want from you, and
probably I'm not going to get it. Did he actually find out anything useful for us?"
"One thing. Just one. The last thing we sent him for. The first two were no-shows."
"One out of three," Sander said reflectively. "Not that bad for a throwaway, I guess. Did he make
anything of it? Did he say anything to anyone?"
"Not that we were able to discover. We got the trial transcripts at the same time everyone else did. Nothing in them made any sense in terms of-"
"Don't say it," said UU563 56VIW hurriedly. "That far, not even I trust the encryption. Well, good. Make sure the poor fool gets out of the system and stays out. These minimal assets," Sander said, "you have to wonder why we acquire them. Still, when the recruitment's stale, or as a throwaway . . ." He shrugged. "All right. Go on, go back to work. Where are they posting you next?" "The scuttlebutt says Aegis. We have to go pick up some other hotshot Administrator."
"Yeah, well, be more careful with this one." UU563 56VIW chuckled, more to himself than to the other, and broke the connection.
He leaned back again and sighed. It was very sad in its own way. Subtlety, wearing its T-slick and doing a little dance, was fast retreating into the wilderness. Oh well. Six months' work, what's that? I'll think of something else. And not depend on them this time.
Meanwhile … He waved his hand over the desk to see what it would list and said to the air, "Anything new for me?"
"Those files you asked for."
"All right, bring them in. And get QI140's pay file sorted out too. I suppose he's due the usual pittance for that report."
A few seconds later his assistant came in with a pile of carts and a much smaller one, a 3D crystal "chip" of the kind that the Company used for nondenominational payoffs. UU563 56VIW picked the chip up, stuck his thumbnail in it, read out the past payment codes and amounts and keyed one new one in. Then he tossed the chip back at the assistant.
"You still here?" he said, for now that the moderately enjoyable duty had been taken care of, already the tension was beginning to build toward the one that would not be so enjoyable. "Don't just stand there vaguing out on me like some damned Inseer."
His assistant looked shocked. Sander let her. Officially these days VoidCorp denied the very existence of the treacherous rogue division that had declared its independence and somehow even managed to get itself instated as a stellar nation. After the colossal crime of crashing the VoidCorp main Grids and practically-Sander stopped himself. Too much thinking about what might have happened in that terrible hour was potentially dangerous, possibly even heretical. Never mind. The Corporation had survived, but their enemy still lurked out in the dark of space, busying itself with cyberwarfare that was still unfinished, leaping from ambush every now and then to foil some important VoidCorp strategy, or even to do something as petty as kill an executive or two. Their pettiness itself betrayed them. They had no grasp of the importance of the great Company goal, but instead went wittering off about independence and the search for ultimate knowledge and other mystical blather. It was laughable. They didn't have the vaguest idea of what real freedom was. ''Service is perfect freedom," one of the ancient sages had said. No matter that he hadn't worked for the Company and probably hadn't even known what he meant. He was right.
"Never mind that," UU563 56VIW said. "Just go sort out QI140's payoff account, and then don't disturb me for an hour."
She went, ducking deferentially to him as she closed the door.
Sander sighed and sat back again, looking up just briefly at the Mudball and the green jewel sailing around it. A slow enough orbit, once every fourteen days. Sometimes the thought occurred to him that one could interfere with that orbit. There were newish technologies that one might exploit. Of course, there was the problem of the Hatire who had been recolonizing the planet. Busybodies. What business had the StarMechs selling them that colonization contract in the first place, anyway? And the various other rogue humans scattered around the place. No. It was an inelegant solution. Better not to waste the time thinking about it.
But what a mess local space and further space both had become. All the stellar nations interleaving and interweaving, all sticking little tendrils of influence into one another's territory. It was all very disorganized and untidy. They needed someone to tidy it up for them.
If the Company got its way, it would eventually see to that tidying, no matter what the other nations might have to say about it. That day would be worth waiting for.
Sander sighed and picked up the other reports, knowing what he would see there before he even looked, the monthly output numbers for Iphus Mining Division and the usual report from RC094 29KIN Faren Reaves. Like its author, the report was unimaginative stuff but reliable. Nothing there was of real interest. But right now Sander's-
His assistant said, out of the air, "WX994 02BIN to speak to you, sir."
Damn! He wasn't supposed to call for another– But there he was, in all his theoretical glory, sitting behind his desk. The hologram wavered a little above the floor, but WX994 02BIN was unconcerned if he noticed it. UU563 56VIW stood up hurriedly. "Sir, I-"
"Am not ready, as usual. I could have told you that." If there was one thing Sander hated about the man,
it was his big bluff air of geniality. Behind it, inside that huge bear-like body, was a heart of meteoric
iron, well coated with ice. "You know what I want to talk to you about."
"The Thalaassa incident, sir. Yes. The first thing that needs to be dealt with is-"
"Don't get the idea that you're handling this meeting," said old WX, grinning, and the mustache
positively bristled with amusement. "What you need to know first is that I am not pleased. The second
ambassador was not to have been targeted for any purpose. There were projects in which her hand would
later have been valuable."
Specifically because she wasn't as smart as her boss, UU563 56VIW thought. "Sir, that is one of the aspects of the operation that regrettably did go out of control. Unfortunately no one could have predicted that the marine whom the Ambassador had been seeing privately would have-"
"And about him," said old WX, frowning. "Was he possibly working as a double? Genuinely Diplomatic or Concord Security, I mean, as well as an acquired asset?" "No evidence of that, sir. If we look at the-"
"We haven't looked at half the things we should have," said WX, "and one possibility that disturbs me is that the Concord Diplomatic Service's Intelligence people, or just normal Intel, have somehow undermined our assets in that area. That would be a tragic result, both for the undermined and for you. Ombe would come down on you like a ton of the rock of your choice."
UU563 56VIW swallowed. "Ombe" was the VoidCorp Sector Security Chief QN105 74MAC, a fierce– tempered and small-minded woman who took her job more seriously than anything in the world and had a list of "enemies," or Employees whom she considered failures, as long as a weren's arm. Her enemies tended not to prosper.
"I don't see how that could possibly be, sir," said UU563 56VIW as carefully as he could. Almost certainly this interview was being taped, and if it later proved that he had been wrong … "If you look at the results, they suggest that such undermining would have meant the ambassador being tipped off as to-" "If you look at the results," WX said, his voice getting a little louder, but not unsociably so, "you would notice that the leaders of Phorcys and Ino signed a treaty. Signed their names to it in private. They had to sign their names to it in public because the third ambassador, who would have been killed if I had my druthers, and the wretched captain of Falada held their noses to it and insisted that they go through with the public ceremony on time, despite trying to stall 'in memory of the architect of the peace, blah blah blah.' Now we have useful people dead, useless people alive, and a treaty that, even though it isn't quite a peace treaty, is so bloody tightly worded that these two planets can no longer carry on with their previous business, which I desperately hope I do not have to spell out to you at this late date." WX
smiled, a genial expression which ran ice down Sander's spine. "This is not a good situation, UU563 56VIW, not in the slightest. Had the ambassador not gained the intelligence jump on us that she did, the treaty would never have been signed. Soon enough matters would have relapsed to the comfortable status quo that we have been promoting for lo, these many years. I want to find out how she knew what she knew. I want anyone who seems to have information about how she knew what she knew found, brought in as subtly or unsubtly as you like, and emptied of everything that may be of use to us. I want that done now. Soon. Maybe not before you get up to pee, but nearly that soon. And then I want recommendations on how to get the Phorcys and Ino situation back to the way it was. Fortunately, those idiots hate each other's guts so thoroughly that it shouldn't take much time to think of something. Others are thinking of things too. Let's see if what you come up with is better." That smile seemed to be suggesting that it had better be. "Attention attracted to them, once again, will divert it from other things better ignored. How long will it take you to get a report of present intelligence status on my desk?" "Just a few minutes, sir."
"Do it. I'll speak to you again this time tomorrow." And WX was gone.
Sander Ranulfsson, UU563 56VIW, sat down in his chair and put his head in his hands.
As subtly or unsubtly as you like, the man had said. They must have that new software in place, at least
in the beta stages.
Whether they did or not, it was not a good day any more. Chapter Seven
THE BAR WAS a dive. There was no kinder word for it. The grimy, crowded room had little light and was further dimmed by the various smokes and fumes emanating from the tables and booths. It was the kind of place into which no self-respecting marine would ever have gone unless it was to help a buddy win a fight. From the booth where they were sitting, Gabriel looked around at the dim, ugly little restaurant-cum-bar with its tacky, dingy furnishings-suspended lamps with fringe hanging down, moving "modern art" wall images that had ceased to be modern two decades ago-and thought, not for the first time, that he had come a long way down from his former exalted place in the world. For the truth was that, right now, even this looked good to him. "You have not touched your soup," said Enda.
Gabriel looked up at Enda with what was fast becoming the usual look: bemusement. " 'Swill' would be more like it," he said.
"That may be so," she said, "but we lost the right to treat it like swill when we paid for it. If you do not eat it, I must."
"I wouldn't put that much strain on a new friendship," Gabriel said as he picked up the spoon again. On the day that his trial ended, the day Enda had come for him the second time, she made no great demands on him. She merely walked him out into Duma, the brown-looking capital city of Phorcys, and there engaged a tiny two-room suite for the night. Calling the place a "suite" had been nearly as much an act of hyperbole as calling the contents "rooms." There was just enough room to lie down in each of them, with a two meter line of shelf space above the pallet that nearly filled each "room." Sanitary
facilities were down the hall in which the suites were stacked. These so-called facilities were exceptionally minimal, the lights being metered as rigorously as the water. At the time Gabriel noticed little of this. He had thrown himself down on the pallet with the unthinking gratitude for freedom of someone whose most recent sleeps have been in a jail cell, and there he lost the next twenty or so hours of his life, going blissfully and instantly unconscious.
His awakening under a ceiling only two feet from his nose was less than rapturous. There had been that magical moment when everything was dark and he was still befuddled with sleep. For a moment only, he actually believed that he was back in his cabin on Falada. It took only a second's worth of light (brought on when he reached out to feel for the edge of his bunk) to show him reality, and it was bitter. Not even Enda's gentle voice was able to do much for his mood on that first morning, or rather afternoon, of freedom.
It had been Enda's opinion that human physiology was briefly at fault-specifically, blood sugar-and she had brought him down a grimy, garbage-strewn street, under yet another dim, cloud-curdled sky to a banged-up wooden door set in an old blank stone wall. Inside was the Dive. The entry was itself uncomfortable enough. Even the gray day outside was bright compared to this place. It took a good few seconds for Gabriel to get his vision working. He must have looked like a gaping hick, standing there blinking into the darkness for some seconds. When his eyes were working again, he could see that everyone in the place-maybe eight people, scattered around the ill-lit booths and curtained-off tables– was staring at him. None of the looks were friendly, and to tell the truth, Gabriel would not have wanted any of them to be friendly, to judge from the general looks of the people. They were unkempt and ill-favored, and they sat hunched over their food or drinks like men and women who thought that, as a general rule, strangers should be shot or-better yet-knifed, since lanth cells and bullets cost money.
Enda paid them no mind at all but led Gabriel over to an unoccupied booth and made him sit down. It was hard. Gabriel wanted to grab a scrub brush and attend to the table, the benches on either side, and some square meters of the floor before actually coming in contact with them.
"Not now," Enda hissed at him, good-humoredly enough, and Gabriel sat, though he kept shifting and twitching in the seat.
After a little while the food came, and Gabriel had to try to do something about it, though mostly he wished what he had done was to order just bread and kalwine, as Enda had. The soup was highly suspect to the scrupulous palate of a marine-a former marine, he kept telling himself, while still finding it somehow impossible to believe-and the atmosphere got worse, not better, as the other habitues of the Dive got used to his and Enda's presence there enough to begin ignoring it. The group over at one of the curtained corner tables in particular got noisily jocular-at Gabriel's expense, he thought, but their dialect was so thick that it was hard to tell for certain. Then they got obscene, and finally they began to sing, which to Gabriel's eventual astonishment turned out to be even worse than the obscenity. It wasn't that the song itself was rude. It was innocuous enough-but not one of the entities present had the faintest idea what key they were in.
"Now my newfound friends My money spends Almost as fast as winkin', But when I make
To clear the slate,
The landlord says, 'Keep drinkin'! '
Oh, Lord above,
Send down a dove
With beak as sharp as razors
To cut the throats
Of them there blokes
What sells bad beer to spacers-"
It was a universal sentiment, or at least one that Gabriel had heard before on other planets, in other company, and sung in recognizable keys. The poignancy of the contrast between then and now made his eyes sting. He worked to master himself, intent that whatever else he might do with this soup, he would not cry in it.
Gabriel glanced up at the fraal sitting across from him, calmly crumbling her bread into her plate, and wondered for about the thousandth time what to make of her. She had come from nowhere, given him clothes and guidance, and most bizarrely of all, hope. Even a grain of that was welcome at the moment. Enda was unquestionably a godsend. But questions were a matter very much on Gabriel's mind at the moment, and he was unable to simply let any recent occurrence, no matter which god was involved, go uninvestigated. He had been too trusting about letting other matters of late go that way. As a result, his life was changed out of all recognition. He was determined not to let it happen again. Enda was at least more somberly dressed than she had been on that first meeting, now in a dark coverall that favored the prison clothes Gabriel had been so glad to get rid of after the "suite." But there was no hiding the blue radiance of those eyes, and it was surely an illusion brought on by her natural paleness that made her seem to glow slightly in the darkness of the Dive. Gabriel was perfectly aware of the glances being thrown at Enda from some of those booths. Here and there a curtain would twitch back, eyes would gaze briefly out into the darkness, then the curtain would fall again. Enda went on with her eating, delicate and abstracted, and paid the watchers no mind-or at least, she seemed not to. She had already often given Gabriel the impression that she was watching everything but making an art of seeming not to.
Of course there was always a slight sense of mystery about any fraal, even though they were the alien species that humans had known the longest. Partly this had to do with their innate sense of privacy. They had long since lost their homeworld and many of the talents and treasures associated with it, but they did not generally trumpet the fact or bewail their fate. They got on with life as they found it, which included humans and other species, and they handled it in the ways that best suited them.
Gabriel knew that by and large there were two kinds of fraal, Wanderers and Builders. The former came of stock that, after leaving the fraal homeworld long ago, preferred to hold to the traveling lifestyle, moving from system to system in their city ships and avoiding too much contact (or, humans whispered, "contamination") with other species. The Builders, even before they came across human beings, were more committed to establishing colonies on planets. After their first official contacts with humans in the 22nd century, Builder-sourced fraal began to intermingle and intersettle freely with human beings. Gabriel often wondered whether any other of the known sentient species could have pulled off this coup so successfully, and often enough he doubted it. The fraal, however, had possessed an advantage. Earlier contact with their kind, in the centuries before human space travel, had made its mark on numerous human societies in terms of myths and images that had come to haunt the "racial psyche" of mankind. The recurring tales of slight, pale, slender people, human but not quite human, longer-lived than human beings and somehow involved with them-for good or ill-had been there for a long time, changing over centuries but never quite going away. When the fraal finally revealed themselves and their ancient settlements on Mars, the response was not the widespread xenophobia that might have been expected, but a kind of bemused fascination, as if the human race was saying to itself, Oh, it's only them. There were those, more paranoid than others, who had seen some kind of elaborate plot behind this, who were sure that the fraal had planted the stories or made those earlier clandestine visits to Earth as part of some obscure master plan having to do with domination or invasion. Later history made nonsense of this, of course, but there were still some who found the fraal, especially the Wanderers, too oblique for their liking.
Gabriel had no problem with fraal. There had been many communities of them on Bluefall and later on his other home. There had been some on Falada as well, though not as part of her marine complement: a few Star Force officers, one of them (Gabriel thought) a pilot who did shuttle work. The thought came before he could stop it. Not one of those I killed, thank everything. He winced, though. Suddenly there were whole great parts of his mind into which he could not venture without pain. Almost everything to do with being a marine, for example. The matter of his lost friends, and that last look of Elinke's, that had outstabbed any knife-
"Brooding at the soup will probably make it no warmer," Enda said mildly. "I believe entropy runs the other way."
"Sorry," Gabriel said. "Enda . . ."
"You will still be asking questions," she said, somewhat resignedly, "and under the present circumstances, indeed I understand why. But there are differences between the ways our two species order their priorities, despite our many likenesses. So I will probably not be able to satisfy you as to my motivations for a long time."
Gabriel sighed. "I don't want to seem ungrateful or suspicious, but you picked me up in a situation where any sane person would have dropped me."
"Perhaps that is why I picked you up," Enda said, crumbling a bit more of her loaf on the plate. "I do not care for littering."
She looked up just in time to catch what must have been a fairly annoyed looked from Gabriel. He regretted it instantly. "A resource thrown away," Enda said, as if she hadn't seen the look, "is in danger of being lost forever, unless it is salvaged quickly. I know many humans find altruism difficult to understand, but for some of us it is a lifestyle, one we count ourselves fortunate to be able to enjoy." She nibbled at a bit of the crumbled bread and said after a moment, "It is an error to say too much too soon, but this you will find out soon enough if our association continues. I too have known what it can be to be cast out of the society in which one has lived comfortably for many years. I Wandered for a long time. Eventually I decided to stop-a decision that sufficiently annoyed some of those with whom my path had lain so that they hastened the process considerably. I go my own way now, but the settled life is not for me."
She cocked an eye at him, an amused look. Gabriel's face must have been showing a great deal of what he was thinking, mostly along the lines of 'If our association continues? Peculiar as it was, uncomfortable as it had made and still was making him, he did not want to lose it.
"Uh," Gabriel said, "I don't think I'm in any position to make any judgments about anyone else's lifestyles at the moment."
"That is well," said Enda slowly, and took a long drink of her wine, "which, I suppose, leaves us with the same question we had earlier. What will you do?"
By itself that was a question that had given Gabriel enough to think about. A marine didn't have to do much thinking about it– you went where you were sent, and it wasn't your business why you were going where you were going or which stellar nation controlled the territory. That was your superior officers' business. Suddenly, though, all of space was spread out in front of Gabriel. And he didn't have a clue where to go.
Thirteen stellar nations inside the Ring. Well, twelve actually. The Galactic Concord and its neutralities were shut to Gabriel, at least if he wanted to remain free. But elsewhere lay wide choice, depending on how you defined personal freedom and the ways it was implemented. There was the unbridled profiteering capitalism of the Austrin-Ontis worlds, the robotic-oriented hedonism of the StarMech Collective, Insight's freewheeling information-based mysticism, the Nariac workers' "paradise," the fierce pride of the Thuldan Empire, the ancient wealth and history of the Union of Sol, the competitive corporate wealth and ferocity of VoidCorp, the Orlamu Theocracy's hungry search for the knowledge that constituted the key to its universe. Theoretically, Gabriel might find a spot in any of them, though again he would have to consider carefully how to avoid running afoul of the Concord's ban. And outside the Ring was always "Open Space," the huge areas that during the Second Galactic War were largely devastated-at least in the direction "toward" the other stellar nations. Out beyond the spaces of shattered worlds rendered unlivable by bioweapons, who knew what possibilities lay? Perhaps it was on purpose that the Concord had made no attempt to do much mapping that way. Perhaps it was a tacit admission that though the Galactic Concord had designated this the last area of human territory, their writ could not truly run so far. The vast distances from the rest of civilization made Open Space, for the moment, effectively ungovernable. Maybe the free spirits of the galaxy who wanted nothing to do with any other races might move out that way, but Gabriel was too gregarious to seek that kind of life, and anyway, it went against the grain in other ways. To find out what had been done to him, he must not run away from the populated spaces but toward them. And do what?
Gabriel was half ashamed of his own paralysis. I've been defining myself as a marine for so long that I've forgotten that there's anything else to be. Yet what else am I trained for? To fight, yes. Of course. But there are other ways to fight.
"I'm e-suit trained," Gabriel said finally, "to what would be an unusually high level of competence around here. That suggests a couple of possibilities: construction and mining." "For which you would either have to contract yourself out," Enda said, "or buy your own ship." Gabriel laughed hollowly at that prospect. "Though it could not merely be a system ship," said Enda. "Or so I would think. Even here, there is only so much belt work to be done and not that many large construction projects. Once work ran out, you would have to look elsewhere, and without a stardrive of your own you would be reduced to hitching a ride with whatever driveship comes along. If, however, one came by whose master thought it would be a good idea to make a little extra money by turning you over to the Concord." She shrugged one hand, a dry little gesture that Gabriel was learning to recognize as one of her favorites. "Unless of course you did genuinely wish to stay in this system, to 'settle' here." "Not the slightest chance," Gabriel answered, looking out the dive's one window into the evening. Snow was blowing by more emphatically on that stinging wind, now almost invisible in the growing dusk. He could still hear the wind, though, and it was not friendly. Space or the controlled environment of a ship– even if there was hard vacuum just centimeters away-now seemed infinitely preferable. "At the same time, I would have thought you would have preferred elsewhere," Enda remarked, "to this, the scene of your-shall we say?-fall from grace. No matter. We may have to stay here a little while regardless, for driveships do not fall from the sky merely for the wishing, much less ships which will actually perform the function that you have in mind. Time will be needed for customizing, ordering equipment, installing it> "
And that was another thing. Gabriel shook his head, for plainly she had not gotten the message earlier. "Enda," he said, "there's one big problem with this. I don't have anything like the kind of money even for a good system ship. I can afford some kind of banger, maybe, but not a decent one, and certainly not a driver. It's not the best idea, just a dream. The only thing I'm going to be able to do is hire myself on to somebody."
"As what?" Enda asked. Gabriel looked at her mournfully. "Some kind of glorified security guard? 'Muscle,' I believe is one of the commoner usages. I suggest, Gabriel, that you would be wasted in this role."
"Wasted maybe," Gabriel said, "but employed."
Enda made a graceful gesture of negation. "Not in a fraal's lifetime of such employment would you make enough to buy a driveship. And I speak from experience, for I have functioned as 'muscle' in my time, though the way fraal reckon such is a little different from the way such jobs function in the human world." She bowed her head "no" in a thoughtful way. "Other options will have to be examined. Meanwhile, there is a fairly active used ship market in this system, and the lending institutions are occasionally sympathetic to the right kind of inducement."
Gabriel suspected that the inducement in question would also involve interest rates that would cripple anything sentient. "Enda, really, you don't get it. I can't-"
"Who said that yours would be the only capital to be called upon here?" she asked. As Gabriel opened his mouth, she lifted a finger. He went quiet. "Now," she said, "hearken. I am nearly three hundred years old, and I have seen little enough of this galaxy in my time. I am getting on in years-" "You don't look a day over two hundred," Gabriel said.
She gave him a fraal's demure smile, which drew the upper lip down over the lower and made her look like an ineluctably wise five-year-old for just a flash. "Gallantry," she said, "the last refuge of the incurably latent. Gabriel, I am of a mind to see the worlds, or some more of them, anyway, without the vagaries of public transport interfering with my schedule. Not that I have a schedule. Occasionally in the past I have considered buying a small driveship, but either finances were unsupportive or I did not desire to hamper myself with the company of those I did not trust. Now I have both the time and the inclination, and I do not find the financial climate unsupportive. And there is someone else involved with whom to share the ship, someone I trust."
The incurably latent? Gabriel stared at her and shook his head. Never mind– "Why would you trust me?" She blinked at him. "Because you have nothing left to lose," she said.
Over in the corner, the singing had reached a crescendo from which Gabriel thought it could not possibly increase. He shortly found himself wrong.
"Now my suit's in pawn,
And creds all gone,
And head's too sore for shakin';
I'll take my chip,
Get back on ship,
And blast when dawn is breakin'
Oh, Lord above, send down a dove-"
Gabriel let out just a breath or so of laughter, considering that the song must go back to the Solar Union, to judge by the reference to "creds" instead of Concord dollars. Enda shook her own head, a gesture identical among humans and fraal. "Just what is a dove, Gabriel?"
In his mind he heard the ambassador say, Some kind of bug that gets in bed with you, and he winced again. "It's a bird," he replied. "Some kind of predator, I think, to go by the bit about the beak being like a razor."
"So," Enda said after a moment. "A ship. Not freight, you think?"
Gabriel was tempted, but he shook his head. "Doesn't seem smart. Not at the physical level, even. A marginal system like this probably already has most of the freight traffic it can handle. Not the high– margin stuff like infotrading, either. Too many things that could go wrong for a company just starting out."
She nodded, pushing her plate away. "One engine breakdown leaves you with a cargo of stale data and a pile of lawsuits. Not to mention the cost of the encryption software and the purchase price of the first load and the fact that we cannot go near Concord space." She sighed as the singing dissolved into a welter of coughs, hiccups, and at last into silence.
"There's one thing we could certainly do if we had to stay in this system for a while," Gabriel said, looking out into the dusk. The snow had now vanished from sight, but he could still hear it ticking faintly against the window. "Mining."
Enda looked slightly surprised, glancing around her. "I would not have thought you would so quickly start to enjoy this kind of environment," she said. "Typical enough of the miners' bars you will find in the Belt. Many will be even less congenial."
Gabriel shook his head. "I don't care for it in the slightest," he said. "But it's a way to make steady money, if slow, and it will pay for other things." "Grid access?" Enda asked softly. He looked up sharply at that.
"Doubtless you could conduct those researches easily enough on-planet," Enda said. "No one needs a ship for such. But at the same time, were I in your position, I would always wonder whether someone was looking over my shoulder-someone with the Concord in mind, for good or ill." She looked at him with an expression of which Gabriel could make little. "There will have been people in this system who will have noticed your connection to the old ambassador, and who would wonder what further use could be made of you in one way or another. I am sure you would prefer not to be stuck here waiting for your door to be broken down by one authority or another."
"Space would be safer," Gabriel said as softly, "and as you say, more private." "Also," Enda added, "you will be wanting to do some investigation of your own."
Gabriel looked at her, trying to find out what was going on in her head, but there was no point in it-fraal could be astonishingly inscrutable when they chose to be, their pale, slender faces showing nothing at all. "Enda," he said finally, "I was bought. Or bought and sold. I have to find out by whom and why. Friends died because of it, my career is over because of it, and before I stop breathing, I will know what happened to me. I will clear my name, no matter what it takes."
Enda slowly tilted her head to one side, then to the other. "From where you now sit," she said, "that will be a mighty undertaking. Even for a rich human, a powerful human, the kind of subterfuge that you wish to investigate would be difficult and dangerous. The more you discover, the more attention you will attract. attention from those who wish to see you tried in Concord space, or simply dead in whatever space is most convenient."
Gabriel looked around him. "Does this look like life to you?" he said. "Maybe death would be better." "There pride answers," Enda said, "but perhaps it would be unwise to chide you for the characteristic for which you were originally selected. That and the courage."
"In any case," Gabriel said, "I don't want to move on too far from here until I get a clearer sense ofjust what happened to me. The scene of the crime."
"The crime, if there was one," Enda said, "was perpetrated on a Star Force vessel that is by now very likely some starfalls away from here. That is a crime scene you will now have great difficulty examining."
"But it happened here," Gabriel said. He had been stirring this issue around in his mind for nearly as long as he had been out of that jail, a place that had made thinking difficult at best. "And I keep getting the idea that somehow it has to do with this system, with something the ambassador had found out or was about to find out."
"Other information that is going to be hard for you to come by now," Enda said, though not without some sympathy. "Are you sure this is something that you can realistically investigate? Or are you letting stubbornness interfere with reason because the stubbornness is more comfortable?" It was a thought that had occurred to Gabriel, and one that he had tried to examine closely rather than simply chucking it out of his mind at first impulse. "I don't think so," he replied. "There were a lot of things that the ambassador said to me over the space of the last few weeks that I heard and forgot about or half forgot. I can't get rid of the idea that at least one of them is important. I took a lot of notes on the things she said. I don't have them now; I won't get them back until the marines restore my personal effects, if they don't in fact just confiscate them. But I can't get rid of the idea that something she said is going to help me make sense of this."
Enda bowed her head. "May it be so," she said. "Even at best, I fear you will have a bad time finding out what you need to know. In the meantime, you must do other things, because if you follow this trail too quickly, surely whoever tried to kill you once by the legal pathway will try it again by means less formal. If you are right-if the person or people involved are in this system-they are watching you now." "So I'll be 'broken' for a while," Gabriel said and glanced around him. "Not that that's going to be a difficult illusion to maintain if I keep hanging around places like this."
Enda looked philosophical, an expression at which most fraal seemed to excel. "The food is not expensive," she said, "and probably will not kill us."
"Speak for yourself," Gabriel said, already beginning to wonder about some of the suspicious sounds coming from his stomach.
"The clientele may prove to be useful. Don't look that way! Some of these people are very likely involved with the used ship trade."
"Not in any way I want to know about," Gabriel muttered. "They all look like pirates to me." "I would think it would be protective coloration in a place like this," Enda said mildly. "It is we who stand out here, not they. But this too will redound to our favor, tomorrow or the next day, when we walk into a used ship foundry and find that we're known." "Who wouldn't know me?" Gabriel asked, only slightly bitter.
"You would be surprised," said Enda, "and though many people on Phorcys certainly will know you from the news coverage of the past days, in most cases it will work to your benefit. Many of the people we are most likely to deal with will be watching the transaction with great interest to see if there is a way they can use the information to their advantage. At the same time they will be eager to tell their less savory connections that they sold a ship to Gabriel Connor." She smiled again-a wicked five-year-old look. "They will of course also tell their connections how they cheated you."
Gabriel had to laugh just once at that. "The price of notoriety," he said. "Oh, well… if it means better service . . ."
"I do not know about 'better,' " Enda said. "But certainly rather more attentive. Are you finished there?" "I wish you could find another way to phrase that," Gabriel said as his stomach growled again, more loudly this time. It was suggesting pointedly that the material he had just offered it did not meet its present needs.
"We will work on my phrasing somewhere more private," said Enda, rising gracefully, "as well as on specs for this new… joint venture. Neither of us would want to discuss the specifics in front of the dealer. Let us find out who to pay and make our way back to the small palaces that await us." Gabriel got up and escorted her toward the door, where the proprietor was waiting for them with a tallychip in hand. Eyes rested thoughtfully on them as they went out. No knives, Gabriel thought, as they went out the door. Not this time. But maybe sometime soon.
Perhaps twenty light-years away, or several starfalls, depending on how one chose to reckon it, a man sat alone on a low couch in a room with rose-colored walls. One hand held a datapad in his lap, and he looked down the list written on it with a practiced eye. A two-meter-long tri staff, the signature weapon of a Concord Administrator, leaned against the wall next to him.
His room on board the light cruiser was plain, undecorated, and seemed scarcely above the quality that would have been found in a medium-grade officer's quarters. The man remembered how there had been complaints about that at first. There were people aboard any ship who could not cope with the idea that someone of his stature should not have a room to match it. He let them worry about that and not about what he was doing. It was less trouble to him that way.
Lorand Kharls was now seventy years old, and he took the Verge very personally. He had not been here, of course, for the earliest expeditions. That wave of exploration had begun when the StarMech Collective's ships first broached these spaces after the First Galactic War, colonizing the planets of the star called Tendril. Neither had he been here for the later colonizations of Aegis system by the Orions, or the Hatire's first seizure of Grith, or the settlements of Algemron system by the Thuldans and the Austrins. Kharls had been born more than twenty-five years after the Battle of Kendai, well into what the burgeoning nations of the Stellar Ring called the Long Silence. All through his childhood, during his schooling when he had first fallen in love with the concept of history as something that was happening now, and later as a young man starting his formal adult education, that silence had come back to haunt
Kharls. What was happening out there? There had been no way to tell, not until the restoration of the stardrive-based communications relay near Hammer's Star had brought the desperate cry for help from the colony at Silver Bell ringing across space, seven years delayed. The ships of the stellar nations, and then those of the Concord, had gone out to find what had happened, and they had been unable to discover anything.
Long before that, still deep in the Silence, Lorand Kharls had gone into the Concord civil service. At first his intention had simply been to find out what he was good for. The numerous batteries of aptitude tests through which he had suffered had given his teachers some indication. Soon, rather against the odds for someone born on a third world, he had found himself at the Administrators' College on Ascension. Ten years he had spent there, then another ten years of field work at Senior Cadet level, before taking his first assignment as a Deputy Administrator in the Aegis system. They had told him it was difficult work, but he had hardly noticed. He had been enjoying himself too much, and besides, his eyes had already turned to other things. Kharls had become aware that if he did his work well he might finally be allowed to live in and investigate the great mystery that had haunted his young life: the Silence, and the places where it had fallen.
It was silent no longer in the Verge. It had stopped being silent by the time he was first assigned here, four years ago, as an early System Administrator for Corrivale. But two years after that he was detached to more advanced duties as a Cluster Administrator, traveling among the stars within a ten-light-year diameter from Corrivale and watching the intricate interlacing of their cultures and governments– advising when he could, intervening when he had to, acting in his "final judicial" role no more than three times over the years since. When he was young and new to the job, he doubtless would have tried and executed that many criminals out in the backwaters of this or that star system in perhaps half a standard year. Now his job took him to places where the criminals were usually of high enough standing in the community that simply trying them and shooting them would have done little good. He had learned a lot of patience and a fair amount of wile moving among the politicians, and he had not had to shoot one yet. Usually there were more effective ways to intervene. Mostly they had to do with arriving in very large Star Force vessels with very large guns. A gun's vocabulary might be limited, but once it spoke there was some tendency for people to listen very carefully to whoever spoke next. Now a part of the Verge that Kharls took more personally than usual appeared to be having some teething troubles in its neighborhood. There were not that many other star systems in the immediate region of Corrivale. Corrivale itself had once been nothing all that important, that is, until the discovery of the sesheyan colony on Grith, the resurgence of the Hatire, and the inroads since made by VoidCorp. The place was getting crowded. Most specifically, it was getting crowded with power players. Their actions cast shadows a long way, often over people who did not deserve to have their lives shadowed. That was where, when possible, a Concord Administrator might step in and see what could be done. That time had now come to Kharls, so he would uproot himself from here (which would cause talk), resettle himself in another ship better suited to the duty he would assign it (which would cause much more talk), and then finally start "meddling."
Like any good artist, he had not arranged all this without first studying carefully where to go to work. If you wanted to drop a rock on someone's head, for example, you could spend a lot of time trying to push the rock up to the top of the hill to produce the maximum result. Or you could get a lever and a map and push the rock off from right where you were, assuming that the person you wanted to hit with it was presently standing in the right place.
Lorand Kharls's work for a long time now had been inducing the people who needed to be hit by a given rock to go stand under it themselves. The best occurrences of this sort were always when such people started the rock moving under their own power and without realizing what they were doing. You couldn't always count on that happening, but it was always something to shoot for.
And now it was happening, though he wished he understood why.
Phorcys and Ino. They had been a fruit ripe to fall, ready for peace, despite the best efforts of others in the Thalaassa system and elsewhere. Lauren Delvecchio had come along and plucked the fruit with her usual skill, but that skill had availed her no further. The job, or something associated with it, had killed her and numerous others.
That by itself was tragic enough, but rumors had been coming to Kharls's office of something else that might or might not be happening out in the Thalaassa system. Concrete resources on which he could call, at least without stirring up unwanted trouble, were thin out that way. He had sent out feelers to see what the rumors said closer to the source of the problem. He had received no answers back. Somewhat after the fact, Kharls had found that one of the sources he had meant to question had been sold to another bidder quite some time before.
This discovery left him with a whole new box of questions, ones to which he could find no immediate answers. Events began to take their course, and Lorand Kharls sat and watched to see what would happen. The temptation to intervene had been considerable, but Lorand knew that there was no quicker way to lose the formidable reputation of a Concord Administrator than by routinely dashing into planetary legal processes and overturning them. Besides, there were questions about the young man as well. What had he been up to with Delvecchio? What else had he been up to? Whose side he was on? This led to the even more important questions of whether he was still on that side after the disgrace that had befallen him or whether he had turned coats again. The answers to those questions would determine what other questions needed to be asked next-or whether any needed to be asked at all, except the kind of question to which the simplest answer is a corpse. There was some time yet to see what action was required in that area.
Meanwhile, he had set other interventions in motion. The most obvious of them would culminate today, within the hour, Kharls thought. It would cause a great deal of talk, for normally Concord Administrators did not venture too far out of their perceived ambit. The trouble was that the ambit, the Administrator's area of responsibility and power, was still being determined out here in the Verge by trial and error. Worlds not specifically affiliated with the Concord might bridle at the sudden appearance in their space of an Administrator with his or her sweeping powers, but they never seemed to argue about it too loudly when the job was done correctly, and when the spaces in question were left cleaner, more peaceful, or more crime-free than they had been when he started.
When the job was done correctly, Kharls thought. There were always chances that things could go wrong. And this job looked rather more touchy than usual.
He looked at the pad one more time, sighed at being able to find nothing else that needed to be added to it, and dropped it on the couch. That pad was his chief weapon at the moment, his shopping list. He would turn it over to his aide in a little while and then check the execution of the more delicate items in a day or three after he and his staff were settled in the new venue.
There would be the inevitable feeling-out, checking-out period. There were ship captains who felt their authority threatened by the presence of a Concord Administrator who was empowered to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It sometimes took them a while to realize that no Concord Administrator had much interest in playing shipboard politics. Their playing field was much wider, whole systems, whole clusters of stars. Their one duty was peace, and they went through ferocious training to ensure that their personal feelings and emotions would not mar their judgments on the large scale or the small. As a result, their decisions were usually honored, and the solutions they crafted stuck in place. For a while at least, Kharls thought, getting up and stretching. Time passes, situations change. Then you build new solutions.
For the meantime, this particular problem was coming to a head. He had been watching it from a distance for some time, before the word came down from Julius Baynes, the sector administrator for the Verge, that it needed prompt attention. The problem was large, difficult to manage, and spread over a goodly section of space even as the Verge reckoned it. It was also politically touchy, ethically difficult, and morally something of a morass.
Kharls loved the look of it, but handling it correctly would take some tune, possibly too much. If it was allowed to just trundle along at its own pace, there would be no guarantee that this problem would be solved at all-or wouldn't blow up prematurely and wreck its solution half-executed. No, he would have to force the pace, which suggested a detail for the other of the two interventions that were to be enacted immediately. One of them had already been set in train, and not with too much difficulty, since the personnel he wanted were up for reassignment as it was. Conveniently, their immediate superiors had decided that after the traumatic events associated with the deaths of Delvecchio and her party, a change of venue-in this case, a change of commands and ships-would be advisable. The other intervention he had been considering since this morning, since he had finished his packing. Now, as he stood, he decided to go ahead and do it.
He reached down for his pad and stylus and made one more note, emphasizing exactly how he wanted the tiny mission carried out and how the surveillance should be set up. The devil, as one of his instructors had always said, was indeed in the details. Turn your people loose when you delegate, and don't micro-manage them, but don't fail to describe the detail of an implementation to them either. You sharpen your own mind by doing so, and your subordinates learn as well. In turn, the thing gets done as you want it, which in other parts of life may merely lead to pleasure. But here, in an Administrator's work, such a result might make the difference between life and death, peace and war, for many millions. A tap came at the door. Kharls went to the door as it opened. On the other side of it was his aide, a tall young man named Rand, who more or less automatically reached out for the pad Kharls was holding out for him. "The gig's ready, sir," said Rand, "and Captain Orris is waiting to see you off." "That's very kind of him," Kharls said. "This has been a pleasant stay, a very successful stay. I regret having to move on."
No you don't, said the back of his mind, unrepentant, as they made their way down the halls to the shuttle bay. Any problem solved immediately lost its gloss for Kharls. The pleasure of his superior's praise lasted some while longer. What then began to shine for him was the prospect of the next problem at the end of the next starrise or the one after that-a big, knotty, knobby, horrible difficulty, just made for the kind of training they had given him. To every cat a fine rat, the old saying went. Though Kharls had only rarely seen cats and never a rat, he knew what it meant. His enemy, his mission, the thing without which his life had no meaning, was out there waiting for him to come and start working on it. Everything else paled before that. But this truth was one he kept to himself as he made his farewells to Captain Orris and his staff and got into the gig. Only a few moments after buckling in, the engines softly
hummed to life and they were off.
The gig itself was small, looking as if someone had taken the cockpit off a standard shuttle and stretched it out by a few meters, but it was immaculately clean and well-maintained. Its cerametal white skin glowed red with the light of Hydrocus beneath. In contrast, the Heavy Cruiser Schmetterling to which he was moving, loomed over the planet like some great steel-gray sea beast. Turrets and missile bays dotted much of its surface like angry little barnacles, though "little" was only an illusion brought on by distance. Some of those turrets were considerably larger than the gig in which he now sat. The ride over to the new ship was uneventful enough. Kharls looked down on Hydrocus, turning there underneath him, the reds and browns sullen near the terminator, brightening toward the limb of the planet where day was coming up with a ruddy flash of Corrivale through the planet's upper atmosphere. Somewhere on the other side, Grith slipped smoothly toward its primary's horizon, bearing its own old problem that no one had been able to solve for this long while now.
Soon enough, Lorand Kharls said privately to the briefly invisible moon hiding away there in the darkness. Your time will come. But meanwhile .. .
The gig docked, and Kharls's aide got out to see that all the people scheduled to meet them were there. A moment later Kharls stepped forward into the shuttle bay and advanced to meet the fair young woman in Star Force black who was waiting for him.
"Good afternoon, Administrator Kharls," she said, "and welcome aboard Schmetterling."
"Good afternoon, Captain Dareyev," he said. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance after having heard
so much about you. Shall we go where we can discuss further what Schmetterling's mission will be?"
Chapter Eight
THE NEXT MORNING when they went out in search of breakfast, Gabriel found the package waiting for him at the front desk of their hotel. It was pitifully small, considering what had once been in his closet aboard Falada, but much of that had been various versions of uniform, to none of which he was now entitled. Gabriel stood there on the doorstep, unwrapping the package: some paperwork, notes-not the ones he thought he had kept from the ambassador. Some security-conscious person had probably confiscated them; a couple of plastic books, quite old, that had been presents from his father; a couple of laminated solids of his old home on Bluefall, that particular shot of the way the lake looked in the afternoon; and the little, dark, matte-finished stone.
He dumped it out of the wrappings into his hand, and it glowed only very dully. "Too much light out here, I suppose," Enda said, glancing at it incuriously. "By night it must be fine. Will you want to leave the rest of that here?"
Gabriel nodded and dropped the stone into his pocket. He then went back into the hotel, paid an extra couple of dollars for access to his "room" out of hours, and locked the bundle up. After he came out again, he and Enda found their way up to the main boulevard of the capital city, hailed a flycab, and made their way to the first of several used ship foundries.
As with many other planetary capitals where physical registration of a ship would normally be handled, there were at least ten or eleven of these facilities, doing everything from part-time salvage to breaking to "almost new"-basically, just relicensing work for pilots who had one reason or another to want to
swap a
ship for another of nearly equal age and quality. Usually this had to do with trouble with the law, and the quality of the ships was more than offset, for Gabriel, by the almost unavoidable suggestion that a ship bought under these circumstances was almost certainly somehow tainted, and that possibly you were as well.
The first shop was one of these, not much more than a "swap shop," and the salesman who came out to show them around the yard-a huge space of stained concrete, blindwall force-reinforced fencing, and rolled back no-fly nets-looked as if he had just been unwound from around a driveshaft. He was covered with grease that smelled faintly of electrical equipment, and he wore an expression that suggested he didn't think either Gabriel or Enda could afford anything in his place. "Whatchalookinfor?"
"Something in the line of a Lanierin Four Forty or a Delgakis," Gabriel said, this being the opening line on which he and Enda had agreed. Their whole "script" went through many permutations and could go on for hours if necessary, depending on whether one or the other of them thought that something suitable might be hidden in the "back room."
The man shook his head immediately and almost with pleasure. "Nothing that new here," he said. "We got Orneries, Altids, some StarMech stuff pretty used."
Those would have been the best of the lot, but they were plainly the exceptions. Gabriel looked around and could see nothing standing on the landing pans but ships mostly less than three years old, bigger than they needed, more expensive than they needed. He would have shaken his head and walked out right then, but Enda said, "Show us what you have. Some of these look big for our needs, but if the other equipment is right, we might be convinced."
They let the man take them around the various ships. He was a little reluctant at first but he soon gained energy and interest as he got the sense from both of them that they were both actually interested in buying and were not simply "timewasters." When the two of them had a thorough poke around and in and through
the twelve or so ships that were remotely of interest, Enda thanked the man politely and headed for the
gates, making for the street that led to yet another shipfounders' yard perhaps a kilometer away.
They walked on down the grimy road, Gabriel looking with some slight weariness at the relentlessly
industrial quality of the land all around them. Weed-patched vacant lots, scarred concrete, bare fences
and walls, and many many junked ships seemed to stretch for some miles away from them, toward the
horizon where (it being clear for a change) the dim shapes of distant mountains were visible.
"This is going to take us a while, isn't it?" Gabriel asked.
"At least twenty minutes to walk to the next place," Enda answered.
"No, I mean to get off here."
She looked at him wryly but with understanding. "Your life has been lived very fast, I think," Enda said. "Now you feel a different pace and are uncertain whether you like it." "No, I'm certain," Gabriel said. "I don't like it."
Enda chuckled. "We will see how long that lasts. Meantime, there will be time for the people back at Joris's Used Ship Heaven to make some commcalls."
"Warning every other founder's in the area that there are a couple of hot ones coming."
"And what we are looking for. We have just saved ourselves some time, I think."
At first Gabriel was not so sure. The next lot was almost identical to the first one except that its ships
were older, and the woman who came out to meet them was in a slightly tidier coverall. The main problem from Gabriel's point of view was that almost all those ships were too small. Some of them had been runabouts, just pleasure craft, and while they were drive-capable, they either weren't roomy enough or well enough shielded. It was much on Gabriel's mind that stars with good asteroid belts had a tendency to flare. The nearest good mining system, Corrivale, had problems of this kind. A ship without enough shielding would
cook all its contents during a flare. Your remains would be sterile, but that would be all that could be said for them.
Enda noticed the lack of shielding and the size problem, and once again they thanked the woman and moved on down the road to the next founder's yard. Rather to Gabriel's astonishment, the sun actually came out as they reached its gates. He looked up, half tantalized and half saddened by the memory of the first sight of that pale sunlight through the tall windows of the courtroom, then he shook his head and went in after Enda.
This founder's was, if anything, dirtier and more chaotic than the first two had been. But the man who came out to meet them, rather to Gabriel's surprise, was clean or cleanish. At least his coverall seemed to have been in contact with some washing surfactant in the recent past. He actually took Enda's hand, which neither of the other founders' people had when it was offered, and shook Gabriel's as well. "Heard about you," the man said. "I'm Gol Leiysin. Come in and see if we have something that fits you." They followed him into the big yard, weaving their way around the piles of conduits and scrap metal that seemed to be piled every which way with no sense or solution to it. "Spring cleaning," Leiysin said. "Don't let it frighten you."
"You do this every spring?" Gabriel said, just avoiding tripping over some more conduit.
"Spring on Lecterion, sure," Leiysin said and laughed between his teeth. "We're not fanatics. What are
you looking for?"
This time Enda began the recital while Gabriel tried to remember how long Lecterion's year was. It was a gas giant in orbit around Corrivale, that much he remembered, and that Omega Station, a Concord base, orbited one of the planet's moons. If he and Enda were indeed going to Corrivale in search of work, they would have to steer clear of Lecterion simply to prevent him from being arrested. But the planet's gas-giant status suggested that it was a good way out in its system and should therefore be easily avoidable.
"Got some older Delgakises," said Leiysin. "We don't get much call for the Lanierins; parts are too hard to get out here. There's no source for them much closer than Aegis system. Delgakis has a service depot on Grith, though. Handy. Take a look here."
The ships he showed them were old workhorses, not one of them much less than a decade in age, some pushing two. The age itself was not that much an issue. Delgakis was one of those makes of ship known to be "long runners," with thousands of starfalls in them if their service history was good. These, though, were far enough along in their lives to make you think. Gabriel put that matter aside and just examined the ships for a few minutes. They were all the right size for mining work-about sixty meters long, ample space for crew quarters-meaning room for the crew to get away from each other. All of them had good hold space. One of them even had clamps for an extra hold. It was the oldest of the lot, a D80. It amazed Gabriel that they had even been building this ship that long ago. Its lines were surprisingly clean looking, its hull was in fair shape, and the drive bay had held a good-sized stardrive in its time. "Family ship," said Leiysin when he saw Gabriel looking at it. Enda was busy with one of the others.
"They had it from new, apparently, to go by the service record. They did cargo at first, then went for mining afterward. Then they changed again and used the augmented hold for data. A lot of hauls out by Aegis and back into the Verge just after the new drivecomm relay went in to replace the old one lost during the war. By then half the planets in the Corrivale neighborhood were setting up their new Grids now that there was something to link through. Finally the owners did something unusual: they retired. Sold out, went somewhere in-world, found themselves a little cottage up a mountain, and didn't go to space no more."
Gabriel nodded. "They retired the drive too, though."
Leiysin shrugged. "No matter how kindly you treat a drive, twenty years is too long. We've got some here that will fit this module. A Speramundi, a Bricht. The Bricht wouldn't be a perfect fit, though." Gabriel shook his head. The Bricht would be less expensive, but a jury-rigged stardrive was nightmarish to maintain. That much he knew from many late-night horror stories from Hal. "Let's see the inside," he said.
Leiysin took him through. It was a surprisingly roomy ship, especially as regarded the sanitary fittings. This occurred to him as a possible reason why a family who had blasted in this ship for twenty years were able to retire, all alive, rather than having murdered one another for reasons having to do with hygiene. Gabriel knew a lot of people joked about such things, but marines knew better than most how important it was to successful human function when cooped up in a small tin can to be scrupulously clean about it. There was a tiny "sitting room" with a couple of surprisingly comfortable-looking fold– down chairs. Next to the chairs was a modular built-in Grid and entertainment access, possibly another reason the family had not killed one another. The living quarters consisted of three quarters-cubbies, two convertible for storage, and a well-equipped pilot's cabin with room for two to be there without having to be stuffed down one another's jumpsuits.
He came out of the ship to find Enda peering into the main hold. "Commodious," she said. "Should I look inside?"
"Do," Gabriel said, and Enda slipped up the steps and vanished. Gabriel walked around the ship, trying to do the kind of walk-about that Hal used to tell him about, looking for scratches, strange welds, riveted patches that changed color within the patch, other peculiarities. The problem is that I'm not absolutely sure what I'm looking for yet, he thought. I know the symptoms, but not what they mean. But he kept at it anyway.
The ship was shaped like a long, moderately wide box with various sensor relays and system drive equipment extending out of the main hull. Triangular wings jutted out from the rear of the craft. They were obviously intended to stabilize the craft in atmospheric flight, but they also seemed thick enough to be able to accommodate at least one weapons bay in each wing. The command compartment that housed the cockpit was a ten-meter-long cylinder that extended from the front of the ship and tapered into a round nose. Two rectangular bays jutted out from each side of the command compartment. Both of them had been gutted for salvage but could easily be refitted to house either a sensor bay or even a small weapons compartment. The ship's escape pod had also been salvaged, but its housing bay seemed in good shape. Like all of the ships in the yard, the craft's dusky cerametal skin was in desperate need of a good cleaning, but Gabriel could find no exterior damage or unexplained patch work. By the rime he had come all the way around the ship, Enda was coming down the stairs and looking severely at Leiysin, who was watching this whole performance with interest.
"It badly needs a cleaning," she said. "I wonder that with so much attention to the technical end, you had not seen to that by now."
"Detailing," Leiysin said and shrugged, "usually comes last." He gave Enda a thoughtful look. "Well," Enda said after a look of her own at Gabriel, "your decision."
He stood there with his mouth hanging open. Marines were not used to being given decisions of such stature, at least not marines of his rank.
Then Gabriel realized that he was not a marine any more, of any rank, and that other people, normal people, did get to make such decisions … and maybe it was time he started. Both Enda and Leiysin were standing there staring at him, awaiting his decision. "What the drik," he said. "Let's do it."
They turned together to Leiysin, who nodded, looking satisfied. "Then let's go into the office and start the process. Sir, honored madam, will that be cash, or shall we investigate other payment options?" "That depends," Enda said mildly. "How much of a discount do you offer for cash?" Cash? Gabriel was thinking while concentrating on not allowing his eyes to bug out. Leiysin shook his head regretfully.
"Unfortunately the traffic in the system is light enough that it is not cost-effective to give cash discounts. No business here could-"
"Spare me your tales of woe," said Enda. "May the time come soon when you find yourself enough closer to civilization that you are dealing a little less close to the edge." Gabriel blinked, wondering what that meant. "Are you offering contract work for mortgagees?"
This time it was the dealer's turn to blink. "Phorcyn law forbids that kind of transaction-" Gabriel's ears perked up at that. The man had not quite said that he didn't offer contract work. But he finally said, "No, I don't want anything to do with that at this stage." Enda nodded to him. "Then we will examine the competing interest rates."
"Competing?" The dealer looked at her in surprise. "Honored, unfortunately the only bank offering ship escrow on Phorcys is-"
"You must think I was born only a hundred years ago," Enda said, and Gabriel grinned. "Flattery. Of course there are more banks available than just the one. I can arrange finance clear back in the Solar Union if I so please, and perhaps we should. Gabriel?" He nodded to her and turned to go.
"No! No, honored, wait, I'm sure we can come to some agreement-"
Gabriel paused, and after a moment nodded again. The remainder of the financial discussion went by with merciful speed; apparently Leiysin was so terrified of the possibility that this particular transaction might walk away from him that his spirit was nearly broken, and he sat there nodding and agreeing to everything Enda said. It was an interesting development, but as with so many others lately, Gabriel found himself wondering what it meant.
Other details took rather longer to sort out. Verifying the ship's condition came first. One of the independent examination companies had to come out and certify the ship's spaceworthiness-that could be done tonight. Then there was the matter of fittings. A mining ship, even the smallest, required better than usual shielding (since ores are likely to be radioactive), specialized assay equipment, and a fair amount of weaponry-since the work was lonely and the space in which it took place were not much frequented by others except asteroid miners, there are plenty of people willing to take advantage of you. There was also the matter of the installation of the new Speramundi drive. Also, the kind of modular shielding that the ship had once borne and that had been removed for data haulage would now need to be reinstalled. Enda also seemed unusually concerned about the type and quality of the weaponry Leiysin had to offer them. Gabriel supported his end of things by making it a point to be unusually picky and difficult about the mining equipment. What poor Leiysin was making of the whole transaction, Gabriel had no idea.
They signed the initial "commitment" chip after about an hour of detail work. Enda put down the deposit, five percent of the vehicle's full price with the rest scheduled to follow according to the loan repayment schedule that would be arranged with one of several banks tonight or tomorrow. They walked out of there well into the beginning stages of ownership of a Delgakis D-80 "Orindren" driveship, with only a few hundred things like system registration and victualling and drive fueling to handle. For Gabriel it was an exhilarating feeling, the only one he could remember having in some time: the beginning of a new life or rather, the beginning of the long process of finding out what had gone wrong with the last one and fixing it.
Later he started having second thoughts. "Do you ever have first ones?" Enda asked, teasing somewhat. They were back in the Dive for this discussion, the noise level there at this time of night so horrific that no one not standing directly between them could have managed to overhear them. As for the mere fact of the sale, probably everyone here knew about it already, but anyone wanting to get close enough to hear the details would have to come to grief first. Gabriel ate his soup, which was only marginally better than it had been the other night, and shook his head. "I'm not sure I like it," he said. "Well, would you rather go out without weapons?"
"Hardly! But the level of stuff we bought. Look at the numbers! Whoever installs those is going to talk. Word is going to get out. It always does. And someone's going to come after us, wondering why we need such big guns and thinking that we must have something really worth stealing-" "On the contrary, we will have better weapons yet," Enda said, "but we will not install them here, nor anywhere without posting the customary bribes. Even here, it is possible to make various arrangements in the documentation associated with the weaponry."
"You mean you're going to try to get them to forge the end-use certificates? Do you know what the penalty for-"
"Yes," said Enda, "probably better than you do. It's done all the time, Gabriel, as you know. Or you should know. I sometimes wonder whether the great concentration on producing spotless young entities for the Service does not shelter you too much from the …" she trailed off. "Well, let that pass for the moment. In any case, our gunnery will seem ordinary enough by the time we are through fitting the ship, and there are ways to buy off the actual installers as well, ways to ensure that they stay bought. Other matters .. ."
" 'Other matters'?" Gabriel said. "I noticed something about the final bill."
"Yes?"
"It was larger than what the total should have been by about five percent."
Enda blinked. Gabriel gave her a look and said, "Just because I'm a marine doesn't mean I can't count." "Well, you are certainly right to notice. It is after all your money too, some of it. Quite a bit of it, in fact." She reached around her back and for a moment toyed with that silken fall of pearly hair that normally she kept bound out of the way. "It occurred to me that some slight extra speed might be desired." "Speed?"
"In departing."
Gabriel put the spoon down in the soup bowl again. "Are you telling me that the delivery date on the manifest is-"
"Inaccurate?" she said. "By some days." "When will it be-" Then he stopped himself.
"There are those who can read the lips of even fraal," Enda said and smiled that slight smile. "Perhaps we will let that wait."
Gabriel nodded and finished the last couple of spoonfuls of his soup. He thought Enda probably meant "tomorrow," but she was not going to say it. Probably with reason, he thought as he glanced around him. All around was a darkness full of smoke, drink fumes, and oblivious people shouting or singing at each other. Yet who knew what technology was hidden away in quiet corners, recording chance words that might be sold to a willing bidder?
He sighed, pushed back in his seat, pulled out the little pocket-stone, and began fiddling with it while letting the food settle.
"One thing we must settle by tomorrow morning," Enda said after a moment, glancing up from the wineglass that she had been refilling, "is the matter of the ship's name. They will not let us lift without something." She saw Gabriel pause and added, "You could always simply let them generate a letter and number combination, if you prefer. Something meaningless and non-connoted. Certainly there are species that are suspicious about such things."
Abruptly, Gabriel got the shudder. It had been some time since he had felt that: what his mother, when he was very young, had called "somebody walking over my grave," and then laughed and shrugged it off. It never seemed to have anything specific to do with something bad happening, but the two sometimes came together.
He raised his eyebrows, put the feeling aside for the moment, and said, "No, it can have a name, there's no problem with that."
"What, then? I have no gift for this kind of thing," Enda said. "You will have to choose." Gabriel leaned forward on his elbows and thought, twiddling the stone idly as he did so. The image came to him, abruptly, of that thin patch of sunshine that had shone down on them as they walked through the gates of Gol Leiysin's place. "Sunshine," he said.
Enda tilted her head at him. "Simple, perhaps childlike. No matter. Naming the light is always a good thing. It attracts its attention. 'Sunshine' let it be. We will both have to sign title, but you may as well take care of making the actual registry application, or rather completing it, at the spaceport in the morning. I will take care of the last of the victualling, and when I get back I will go over the final parts manifest with the people from Leiysin's to make sure the inventory is complete. Can you think of anything else that needs doing?"
Gabriel tried to think but couldn't. It was possibly understandable. This h ad been one of the fullest days
he'd had in ages, and he felt much more tired than he should have. He began to wonder whether the trial
had taken more out of him than he would have otherwise suspected.
"Not a thing," he said at last. "Though as a second thought, sleeping would be nice."
Enda chuckled. "I thought you might come up with that one eventually. All right. Let me finish this, and
then we'll go."
She drank her wine, and Gabriel gestured through the singing for the bartender to send someone over to collect what they owed. Drink was cheap enough here, and Gabriel was glad to get rid of his last few pieces of Phorcyn hard currency. Only bills were left, and the people at the spaceport would readily enough put credit on his chip in exchange while they left. When the bill was paid, Enda got up and headed for the door, Gabriel coming after her through the noise and the smoke. "Here," he said, "let me get that for you." It was an old habit, but one he should begin to rediscover, he thought. Enda gave him a dry look as Gabriel opened the door for her, then she started past him. The sound was what hit him first, that low buzz.
His hand shot out almost before he knew what he was doing. He grabbed Enda by the shoulder and snatched her violently back. As she staggered backwards into him, a slug trailing superheated plasma went by directly in front of her, not more than a few centimeters in front of her nose. The slug slammed into the door frame, spraying splinters of wood and stone into their skin.
Gabriel pulled Enda past him, thrust her behind him back into the Dive, and dove out of the doorway. He hit the concrete in the dark. Good thing we've been this way a couple of times before, he thought as he rolled and broke out of the roll sideways. As the charge pistol's fire stitched the concrete behind him, he heard the shuffle of footsteps made brighter than normal by their echo against the nearby wall. He targeted that sound, rolled again, came up and dove straight at the dim shape he saw heading just a little to the left of the dim pink light of the weapon's aiming eye. Wham! His head hit something that should have been softer than it was. A battle vest maybe but not full attack armor. Too bad for you, buddy, Gabriel thought as he came down on top of the man, grabbed his head, and banged it on the ground with one hand while feeling with the other for the outstretched arm. Just out of reach, yes, there it was, an M12 charge pistol, full clip. Nasty. Didn't plan to leave much of her, did you? He pushed up and away from the momentarily inert body, grabbed the pistol, twisted the lanth cell's safety out of its socket, and paused as he heard something. A rustling sound came from the other side of the wall. Oh really, he thought. He immediately selected for "overcharge," then chucked the pistol over the wall after its safety, hard.
Motion underneath him, then a groan. The man probably had some internal injuries and certainly was bleeding badly from the back of his head. This briefly became much clearer in the flare of sudden light from inside the wall. The exploding charge pistol lit everything like a sheet of lightning for a few seconds and rocked the ground. There was a scream from not far away, and the wall shook as something, several somethings, impacted into it with a slightly wet sound.
Gabriel stood up. Enda was standing just outside the doorway, looking with some bemusement into the Dive, from which not so much as a nose had so far put itself out, nor seemed likely to in the near future. "Somebody here doesn't like you much, I think," Gabriel said as he dusted himself off and stood up. "Any thoughts as to who?"
Enda shook her head, looking around. The street in which the Dive was located was very dark, very quiet, and to Gabriel's senses getting darker and quieter by the moment. Even the barroom was deathly silent. He felt oddly elated. That was it, then. Marines had a sense of when trouble, physical trouble anyway, was going to break out. They might take his uniform and throw him off the ship and out of the Corps, but the instinct was still there. Gabriel produced a rather wolfish grin as he looked at the former attacker lying on the ground. "Should we call the police?" he asked.
Enda gave him a wide-eyed look, and Gabriel thought to himself once more that the illusion really was amazing. If he hadn't known better, he would have sworn that those eyes glowed in the dark.
"Gabriel," she said with some humor, "you are an optimist indeed if you think the police would come here at this time of night! Let us be away swiftly before the acquaintances of these miscreants come for them. For tonight the hotel will be secure enough. In the morning, swiftly with us to the spaceport where the ship will by now be lying in bond. We have business to finish, perhaps a whole day's worth-but I for one want to do every bit of it under official eyes, even the last of the shopping, even at field prices. Then we lift."
"But what if the ship's not ready?"
"Then we sleep in her, in bond. We could not get much more secure-and we are paying so much at the hotel that there would not be much difference!" There was a faint sound of footsteps in the distance.
Gabriel raised his eyebrows. Their fighting instructor at Academy had always said, "Gentlemen, after dealing with the baddies, do not depend on the local constabulary or anyone else to understand that you were only defending yourself. Have it away on your heels, and live to fight another day." He grinned at Enda. Together they ran, and the shadows swallowed them.
The next morning they called a flycab to come and get them. Gabriel was in reaction and knew it, but he was unable to do much about it. He felt almost uncontrollably jumpy and couldn't understand why. "I can think of a couple of reasons," Enda said to him in the cab. "One having to do with where I found you. The other . . ." She shrugged a little and plucked at the sleeve of the pilot's smartsuit that she had insisted on buying him after the sale was initiated yesterday. "Your uniform has changed." "Oh." He nodded. "Yes, the old one was protection of a kind, I guess."
"But the talents cannot be taken away as the uniform was," Enda said as the craft leveled out over the public access pad to Phorcys's main spaceport and began to sink toward it. "About that at least you may now rest assured." "I just wish I knew why-"
"So do I," Enda said, "but I would wait for somewhere quieter to discuss it." She gestured with her eyes at the roof of the cab and above. Space, Gabriel thought, and his heart jumped a little in him. He was going to be so glad to get off this planet.
They landed just outside the port's land-access gates, paid the cabbie, went through the spaceport's standard security screening, showed their initial ship-owner's "papers," and then caught a little open tug to take them the three kilometers or so over to the bond yards where ships and goods in transit were laid up. There, off to one side by itself with the port seal obvious on its doors, lay the little ship that would be Sunshine. Gabriel looked at her with some satisfaction, for she had been given a last polish by Leiysin's people. Even in the early morning clouded sunlight that was typical of this part of Phorcys during this time of year, she gleamed. Whether she would be clean enough inside was another story, but Gabriel would have plenty of time to take care of that once they were off-planet.
They showed their papers to the port official who showed up as soon as the tug left. This worthy, a sesheyan in coveralls who wore heavily tinted gailghe even against this early light, broke the seal and opened the ship for them. After giving them the two flat electronic keys that controlled the cargo lift and the doors, he took himself away without much more conversation. Gabriel and Enda got into the lift together, rode up, and came into the utility room that lay directly behind the pilot's cabin . . . and immediately the signal chimed to tell them someone was outside.
"Now there is terrible timing," Enda said, slipping forward to look out the cockpit window. "It is the supplies delivery already."
"I'll start cleaning," Gabriel said, looking around him. Enda gave him a bemused look, then went off.
He had just started on a really good scrub of Enda's quarters when she came back, looking somehow somber as she shut the outer air lock door behind her and opened the inner one. Gabriel looked at her with some concern. "Problems?"
"No, by no means," she said and slapped the control to bring the small in-hold lift chugging up into the ship's body. She and Gabriel both stopped for a moment to listen to the sound of it. The lift wheezed and hiccuped as if something was wrong with its hydraulics-yet on examination neither they nor the "evaluation" mechanic sent over from the field had been able to find anything the matter. "No," Enda said and reached into her satchel, coming up with a small cube-shaped data solid. "The logbook and revised service history, and the licensing paperwork, will be along in a couple of hours, they told me up front. We could leave bond as early as this evening. And all the groceries are here." The lift snugged into place, and Enda made her way down toward the cargo hold. "Did you get everything on the list?" Gabriel called after her.
"No," Enda's voice came floating back, "and if I had, we would have had to pay for another float to get it all over here, and at port prices!" She sounded exasperated. "Most things I got. The useful bulk foods, certainly, and the concentrates. But Gabriel, you are going to have to stop eating like a marine, I fear. We simply do not have cargo space for that much food."
That annoyed him slightly. And I thought I was being so frugal when I made up that list. "Did you get the sugar, anyway?" he said.
"Of course I got the sugar," Enda said. "Am I an alien, to drink my chai black?"
He grinned, then stood up and looked out the cockpit window. Down on the field, someone was walking toward them from the direction of the tower. "Company," he said. "Possibly the papers-" Enda said. "Go see to it."
It was the papers. A man in a coverall that was still in the process of ridding itself of a splash of lubricant strolled up to the passenger lift as it came down. He offered Gabriel a package studded with an impressive number of official seals, ties and fastenings.
"Your partner must sign as well," the man said as Gabriel took the stylus from him. Partner. He found that he liked the sound of that. "Fine. Enda?"
Gabriel scribbled his signature, came up with his ID chip and held it against the authenticating seal. The seal blinked and chirped once to verify that the chip's information had been internalized. After a moment the lift ascended again and came down bearing Enda. She too signed and produced her chip, touching it to the other affixed seal. The man snapped off half of each seal, then handed them back the completed registry package.
"Thank you, sir, honored," said the man. "Please file a flight plan as soon as possible, since Phorcyn law forbids unscheduled or unfiled craft to sit afield for more than three standard hours-" "Thank you. We will be filing directly, won't we, Gabriel?" she said as they both stepped into the lift. "Uh," Gabriel said, "I should be ready in about half an hour." The man nodded and walked away. "Good," Enda continued as they began to ascend back into the ship, "because the timer is running now. Every minute we sit here, we pay nearly six Concord dollars' worth of landing tax. If we take off in prime time, which starts in an hour, it costs us three times as much as if we do it when you said." "Everything costs, doesn't it?" Gabriel muttered. The lift ground to a halt and they stepped out. "Leaving, arriving, sitting still . . ."
"Everything costs," Enda said as she shut the airlock behind them, "some things more than others." She looked around them. "My, you have been busy." "Doing what I know best."
"Well, what you know less well is needed now. Normally, I would have told you what those who knew about such things once told me," Enda said. "Never lift without work or the promise of work and make sure the promise includes refund of your fuel costs." She made that small smile and added, "But these circumstances are not normal, and for a while, where we're concerned, I wonder whether there are likely to be any. No matter." She shrugged. "Let us file that plan and lift right away. The sooner we lift, then the sooner you can also learn to manage the ship in both drivespace and normal space. Where will we go? You will have been thinking about that."
Gabriel nodded. "Eraklion," he said. "The mining cooperative there doesn't have enough of its own ships to move everything they produce, and also, they're a fairly small outfit. You don't have VoidCorp all over the system, apparently, the way they do in Corrivale. No heavy cruisers hanging over your head here."
Enda tilted her head "yes."
"It seems sane enough," she said, "though much of our gear is arranged for nickel-iron work instead of ore. We will have to do some rearranging in the processing area. When do you want to start collecting and on what kind of contract?" "Whoa," Gabriel said, "I hadn't worked that out yet."
"But you had worked out," Enda insisted, "that one of the actions about which your ambassador had intelligence, one of the actions involved marginally with her death, took place there at Eraklion." Gabriel looked at Enda. "Are you sure you're not a mind-walker?" he asked.
Enda pulled her upper lip down in that droll smile. "I don't read minds," she replied. "The news is quite sufficient most of the time, and the rest of the time faces are usually plenty to go on. Well, at average system speeds you will have a day or so to consider the details. Let us get busy and see if she does what we bought her to do."
She went forward and sat down in the pilot's seat. Gabriel made one last turn through the ship to make sure that everything was secure, pausing briefly to look in at the empty cargo hold through its little fish tank window. If everything goes well, in a couple weeks that'll be full. And if it's not, we'll be broke. ''Gabriel, I cannot lift while you are not strapped down!"
He went forward and strapped himself in. I still don't get it, he thought, while under and behind him the engines hummed softly into life. I should feel great right now. We have a ship. We're going to find out what happened to me. At the very least, we're going to make some kind of living for ourselves . . . and begin an adventure. But he felt much less than elated at the moment. Maybe it's just that I've been through a lot lately.
Enda eased the controls forward, and the ship slipped gently upward, the stained concrete of the Phorcys landing ground dropping away beneath her. As if in salute, or just an accident of their rise toward the cloud cover, a final ray of sun broke through, stabbing down onto another part of the spaceport a kilometer or so away. Gabriel looked at it and smiled. A few seconds later they were through the cloud, and all that dismal landscape vanished beneath them, not a second too late for Gabriel. He slipped his hand into his pocket, felt the luck stone warm slightly under his touch as he lifted his eyes to the view above the cockpit and saw, amazingly, the sky already going black. Oh, the stars, he thought in a sudden flood of near-impossible relief, the stars.
And he shuddered at the memory of screams. Chapter Nine
THE STARLIGHT OF open space might now haunt Gabriel somewhat, but over the next couple of days he began to suspect that the reaction would soon start to fade. He now had a whole new set of things to worry about. Any marine had some basic piloting courses as part of his training, but that particular piece of education was one that Gabriel had mercifully forgotten about as quickly as possible. After all, there were pilots for that kind of work. Marines concentrated on fighting, and Gabriel kept yearning toward that part of the control panel that managed the weapons array.
"Not just yet," Enda said. "Some basics first." She had revised their flight plan so they would not be expected at Eraklion for another five standard days. "We can well use a little more shakedown time in space," she had said, "not to mention a little time for both our sets of nerves to quiet themselves after the last week." And shaking down did happen. The Grid-based communications and entertainment system threw some interesting monstrums while they both attempted to configure it for the kinds of entertainment they preferred, not to mention initially refusing to accept any of their payment details. That sorted itself out, but by the time it did, Gabriel found himself spending more and time with the piloting manuals. It was mostly stubborness, Enda claimed. Well, if it is, it's not a bad thing, Gabriel thought more than once.
But making sense of the documentation, the first time out, was a daunting business. The ship-building companies had long resigned themselves to the fact that their clients had neither the time nor the patience to master hundreds of different proprietary control arrays, so a ship's piloting cabin was more or less the same no matter from whom you bought it. However, no matter how simple they made the controls, there were still too damned many of them for Gabriel's liking. Right in the center of the console lay what was the most important part of the system for Gabriel's present purposes, the controls for the stardrive. And they scared him witless.
The basics were straightforward enough. The drive was a combination of the fraal-sourced gravity induction engine and the mass reactor, a human invention. Combined, the two engines, when activated, opened a small "soft" singularity through which the vessel containing the stardrive dropped. It then spent a hundred and twenty-one hours there, eleven-squared, no matter where it was headed or how far it intended to go. Gabriel had been wondering Why eleven squared? for a long time, first absently, as a child when hearing about it at school (in exactly the same way a lot of people had), but now a lot more urgently. There were no answers, though many guesses. The best one he heard had suggested that this universe was one of a sheaf of eleven, so that the heritage of that basic symmetry ran through everything, including gravitational fields. Another suggested simply that the number was a product of primes, and thereby somehow inherently "nice."
Not half nice enough for me, Gabriel thought, sitting there and going through the manuals one more time, for that was merely where the trouble started. During that time, just a shade over five standard days, you could travel a long distance, a short one, or not at all, depending on the gravitic coordinates you set as your destination. Here, as elsewhere in life, size mattered. A big stardrive would take you further in that one jump-or "star-fall"-than a smaller one. Their own ship's drive was no bigger than they
could afford, which made it not quite the smallest, but small enough so that its maximum distance per starfall was about five light-years. For their present purposes, that was more than enough. Corrivale, for example, was four point three light-years out, convenient enough for the kind of work they were going to be doing. To go further, you merely had to starfall more often.
If you're comfortable with that, Gabriel thought, turning over pages in the manual again. If you simply dropped into the cooperating void and came out somewhere else five days later, that would be wonderful. Unfortunately the ripples from your initial starfall and your planned starrise at the other end propagated merrily through drivespace for the whole five days. Everybody with detector gear or access to a drivespace communications relay could "see" and "hear" all the starfalls and starrises for about a hundred light-years around.
At least Enda knows how to do basic drivespace work, Gabriel thought. I'm going to have to learn as fast as I can. It wasn't fair to make her do it all. Gabriel was determined to find more ways to pull his weight on this operation. And still niggling at the back of his mind was the idea that, trustworthy as Enda might seem, it still wasn't really wise to leave all this kind of work to another person.
Paranoid, part of his mind commented, but another part said, rather pointedly, yes, but even crazy people have real enemies.
Gabriel sighed and leaned back in the right-hand seat, staring with loathing at the control panels in all their readout-studded glory. He would have given a great deal to be in a situation where pilots piloted and left him alone to get on with fighting, to have his plain, bare cubby back, and nothing more involved to manage than a powered suit. Though now Hal's voice came back to him too, commenting sarcastically, Just because this suit makes you look like an ape doesn't mean you don't have to be any smarter than that to operate it.
He sighed and turned away from the memory, looking at the controls again. For the time being they would have nothing to deal with but system work, which was something of a relief. At the same time, the idea of hanging around this place doing what was unmistakably going to be subsistence work simply annoyed him. Oh well, no way out of it…
"Gabriel," said the voice from back in the "sitting room," "where have you put my water bottle?"
"The one that squeezes?"
"Yes."
"Last I saw it, it was in your quarters."
He could practically hear her raising her eyebrows in an "Oh really" expression. After a moment's silence, she aked, "Well, for once this is true, instead of you having stolen it."
She came wandering into the cockpit, looking out past him at the stars. "You never get enough of these, do you?" she said, sitting down in the other seat with her hands full.
"I never will," Gabriel said, looking over at what she was carrying. One hand held a small pot with some dirt-like growth medium in it. The other hand held the water bottle. Gabriel leaned closer, trying to see what was half-buried in the pot. It was a bulb of some kind. "What is that?"
"Ondothwait," Enda said. "Gyrofresia ondothalis fraalii, the botanists call it in the Solar Union. It has many other names." "A flower? A green plant?"
She looked up and gave him one of those slightly mysterious, specifically fraalish looks. "Eventually one or the other, but it will be a bulb for a good while."
"Well," Gabriel said, shutting the manual and putting it aside, "it's good to see you relaxing."
"It is mutual," Enda said, carefully squeezing water onto the bulb, "but why would I need so much
relaxation? Compared to you, anyway? You have had much the worse time of it."
"You were the one who got shot at," Gabriel said. Both of them still sported small scabs where the
shrapnel from the door had cut into the skin of their arms and face.
"That! What makes you think they were shooting at me?" Enda said.
They looked at each other for a moment. Then Gabriel said, "Uh… 'not proven.' "
"I agree," Enda said, "we are short of data. But why would anyone be shooting at me? I have no enemies
on Phorcys and am unknown. You, however, are known, and there was some public sentiment against
you. Plus we both suspect from your story that other forces could possibly be lingering about you to see
what you would now do. Possibly there are forces acting against them that would prefer you dead." She
shrugged again. "I admit it is a long stretch of reason, but better than any that leads to me being a target.
Soon enough you will find out whether you are the target, for Eraklion is not a very controlled place.
Anyone wanting to singe your hide will have his chance. Though, after the way you reacted the last
time, I suspect they will either use more accurate marksmen or something of higher energy."
"Don't remind me," Gabriel said. "By the way, I heard back from them finally."
"Them who?" Enda questioned, seemingly startled by the change of subject.
"The officials on Eraklion."
"Oh? What was the delay?"
"Security checks, they said." His voice was a little bitter.
"To see if it was legal for them to deal with you?" Enda said. "Well, I suppose that kind of thing is likely until you clear your name. It will be hard, but you too are hard. When do we start?" "They'll have a load of uranium peroxides ready in three days for haulage to Ino. Three hundred tons at nine hundred thirty Concord dollars per ton."
Enda knitted her fingers together, a gesture which Gabriel was learning meant she was doing math in her head. "That is travel costs and food plus twenty percent. Not bad for a first time. Did they say anything about the rate going up later?"
"No. I'll want to watch that. Twenty percent is not that much better than subsistence in this business." Enda tilted her head "yes." "Meanwhile, that Grid program you like comes on in a while." "Oh." Back on Falada, and even before he came aboard her, Gabriel had been an avid watcher of Verge Hunter, a serial Grid drama with plots so turgid and unlikely that a lot of the marines Gabriel knew had been watching it just to have a good laugh at the end of the day. The characters were also hilarious, some of the main ones being Star Force personnel so unlike anything that actually lived or breathed that Gabriel often wondered whether the people creating the series had ever seen a Star Force officer, let alone talked to one. These characters' adventures as they bombed around the Verge destroying villains and generally barging into everything in their path had been the delight of a lot of service people– including Elinke Dareyev, who in her more lighthearted moods (usually late in some party) would shout, "Not for myself, but For The Force!" with such energy that you might have thought she meant it as much as the ditzy second officer of the Hunter did.
"No," Gabriel said, "it's okay, I've seen that one before. I'll just get back to this." He picked up the manual again. "It's a pretty good read."
Enda made a little sniffing noise, the aural version of putting her eyebrows up, and went off with her bulb. Gabriel had to smile slightly as she went. The only genuinely good thing he had seen about the manual's drivespace section so far was the reassuring information that if you should make the mistake of
dropping the ship into drivespace without setting destination coordinates, you would not find yourself in some Verge Hunter-like "lost universe" from which you would never return. Your ship would just bob up again immediately at the same spot, leaving you embarrassed but otherwise no worse off. Apparently this was how the drive-based communication relays worked, bobbing "up" and "down" out of drivespace, sending messages at star-drive speeds while "submerged" and picking up new ones when they surfaced again. Gabriel had been relieved to find that at least he could not kill them both that way. Leaving only about another ten thousand ways to do it.
Soon enough they would be experimenting with those. Mining, at best, was not safe work. It involved a lot of heavy machinery, usually in vacuum or noxious atmospheres, and all kinds of things could happen. Accidents-genuine ones, as well as accidents that weren't. What Enda had said about the shooting was something that had occurred to him before, and there were other matters. He could not get rid of the memory of the ambassador's voice saying, I wish I knew why this was happening now. Maybe someday, a few years down the way, we'll find out what it was. Increasingly, though there was no question that his main business now was to clear his name, Gabriel found himself wanting to find an answer to the ambassador's question. It's almost a superstitious thing. As if, if I can find out the answer, her ghost will rest quieter somehow.
He sniffed at himself. He was not superstitious, but the idea of somehow paying a debt-paying it forward, as she had called it, rather than back; paying it to her service, in her memory-that was not a bad one. He would do what he could. Business would mean that he and Enda would be passing through cities on both Phorcys and Ino every now and then for the next-he didn't know how long. Gabriel wanted to keep his contracts short. But I'll keep my ears and eyes open. Who knows? Maybe I'll even find out why they hate each other so much. If not…
The thought trailed off. It would have to wait. He was going to have to learn to be patient. And if he– From the sitting room, a voice shouted, "Not for ourselves, but For The Force!" and an entirely-too– familiar theme song began, playing an overheated fanfare in the trumpets. Gabriel sat there for a moment, looking wryly back in that direction, then marked the manual at the page that began the section headed DRIVE DISTANCE/MASS EQUATIONS. He put the manual down carefully on the seat and went back to see what Enda was finding so funny.
Two days later they were at Eraklion, settling toward the pale brown surface of the planet, and Enda was standing over Gabriel's shoulder, letting him do the piloting. He had resisted this at first, but a few hair– raising experiments during which Enda attempted to purposely crash Sunshine into asteroids while the ship was running on autopilot convinced Gabriel that this robust little craft was, astonishingly, proof against even him. With the control supervision center set on "Panic," the ship was ready to snatch control away from him before he did anything terminal, so Gabriel made his first landing outside the opencast facility at Ordinen.
It was nothing more than a gigantic ugly hole in the ground. Once the mine works had been in a mountain, one of many. But the miners had grown expert, and the equipment had grown more aggressive and large, and within the first century or so of mining the mountain went away. Over the next century, as the system's fissionables needs increased, many more of the mountain's neighbors went away, until now the effect was of a tidy and almost perfectly hemispherical crater eight miles deep and fifty miles wide, still surrounded by mountains, though ones that looked very ephemeral. A careless viewer could have mistaken the site for a colossal meteor strike, except that meteors did not usually leave terraced sides in their craters.

The whole landscape there was an odd silvery brown, suggesting that lead ores accompanied the pitchblende that was being mined there. All along the terraces, endless unmanned mechanical diggers went up and down, bringing the mined ore up to massive spoil heaps at the "crater's" edge. From these spoil heaps the ore was transported by old-fashioned human– and fraal-driven trucks, though huge ones. The work of loading and unloading into the six processing facilities was just complicated enough to make AI a little less than cost-effective. The facilities themselves produced prepackaged uranium peroxides and other associated lanthanides, which were in turn containered and loaded into the waiting cargo ships, all very neat, very organized.
But Gabriel, landing and getting out in his e-suit, could only look at that huge hole and think of the holos he had seen of the little ships coming in low and fast over the mountains, and of the great gun-bristling shape of Callirhoe coming slowly up from the depths of the workings, big and round and broad– shouldered, but also grim looking, like a monstrous cetacean with a grudge to settle. And how the little ships scattered themselves to the eight directions when the guns went hot-
They landed near the number six packaging plant as requested in the contract. The plant was a big blank– walled facility with several gigantic open doors and no windows.
Someone in an e-suit came out to meet them under the near-black sky and said, "Sunshine?" "That's us," Gabriel said. "Connor. Enda."
"Maxson," said the tall woman inside the e-suit, and they clasped arms, that being more generally accepted as a greeting while suited than handshaking. "Your first time on this run?" "Yes," Enda said.
'TX, then. Run your ship into that fifth door. That's where your cargo is. Check the manifest after this; it'll tell you which portal to check. You have one hour to load. The next load comes in after that hour and gets dumped right on top of yours if you're not out of the way by then." "For three tons of packaged ore?" Gabriel said. "That's not a lot of time."
"Machines will help you," Maxson said, sounding and looking tired and annoyed. "Just the way it is
around here, I'm afraid. You'll get used to the rhythm or you'll find other work elsewhere. Better get
moving. You're eating your hour already."
She moved off, and Gabriel and Enda looked at each other.
"At least it is very organized," Enda said.
"There are worse things than organization," Gabriel agreed. They headed back to the ship. Fifty-eight minutes later they were nudging Sunshine out of portal five, and Gabriel was swearing softly under his breath as the ship made it plain she would answer a lot differently to her controls when fully loaded than when empty.
"I thought she's supposed to compensate for the load," Gabriel muttered to Enda as they gingerly hovered their way of the loading facility.
"She does when she is evenly loaded," Enda said, and Gabriel heard her trying hard not to lay blame anywhere.
Both of them were new at this particular work, but Gabriel got the feeling he was much newer at it than Enda was, and at the business of getting the most out of the loading machines that had been assisting them. The machines could have used a dose of better AI than they had, Gabriel thought. In the event, he and Enda had wound up muscling many of the last half hour's worth of loads into the ship themselves at increasing speed. Processed uranium is not light-it is after all a close relative of lead-and Gabriel found himself trying to do math in his head without the assistance of laced fingers as he got the ship up and out of the processing facility and headed her for orbit. I'm already aching in places I didn't know I had. How am I going to feel about this time tomorrow?
Enda was looking down through the cockpit windows at the silvery-brown ground dropping away beneath them. "Is twenty percent," she mused, "really worth all this, I wonder?" "Hey," Gabriel said, trying to sound confident, "we just got started." "Indeed," Enda said. "Perhaps we will get better."
The ship got up into microgravity again and immediately began to respond better. The thin atmosphere, hardly there at all, thinned away entirely to leave the view beautifully black again. Gabriel sagged back into his seat and punched in the coordinates for Ino to which the shipment was going. He then engaged the system drive on full and felt the slight subsequent push of acceleration.
"What I can't get over," Gabriel said, looking down, "is that it would have been some of the people from there who tried to destroy the mine works. At least, that's what the Callirhoe crew thought. The attackers knew the mountains. What could those people have been thinking of? It's their local economy, isn't it?" "I suppose we could go down to some of the local bars and ask them," Enda said, "if we felt like getting beaten or shot at. It is the kind of question that is not likely to produce an even-tempered response, especially if any of them get a sense of who you are."
Gabriel thought about that. He wasn't Star Force, true, but he would be thoroughly enough identified with it to the eyes of anybody in this system who had been watching the news lately. "Yeah," he said finally, "but Enda, look.We do need the money, don't we?"
She started to take her e-suit helmet off then dropped her hands, changing her mind. "I will wait until we have offloaded and have had decontam. Gabriel, truly it was said that life in space is an open hole into which one pours the currency of one's choice. Until we start doing true meteor mining and stumble across the Glory Rock, or unless some relative unknown to either of us dies and leaves us vast wealth, we will neither of us ever again really have enough money." She gave him a wry look through the face plate. "That said, this can be a good life. Let us see how it treats us for a while. Twenty percent is enough to keep us going while we do system work. Should we jump out of system, the expense of running the stardrive will push our margins up to perhaps twenty-five, maybe thirty for long hauls. Beyond that…" She tilted her head. "There is no point in planning. Also, you wanted spare time to investigate things here. System work, a steady run, will let us do that."
Gabriel nodded. "I'm going to start spending a lot of time in the Grids," he said, "and I'm going to start doing that gunnery practice now. Don't be surprised if you don't see me much socially." Enda smiled at him. "I have my own work to do, and were life with you not a surprise, I would not have bothered. Let us get this load where it belongs and get on with things."
They did, and they lasted four more loads over the course of ten days. It was not so much the physical exertion, which was brutal enough. Gabriel was hardly able to move the day after their first load, and Enda was little better-rather to Gabriel's surprise. This was the first time he had seen her betray any sign of weariness. Gabriel moaned at the very thought of a hot bath, once a commonplace on Falada, now as out of his reach as some planet's moon on a string for a plaything. They both made do with medicinal rubs that left them smelling like some unspecified alien species, and they sat and moaned, almost too stiff to make themselves something to eat.
The next day they scheduled another contract for the day following, Gabriel having said to Enda, "If we
don't start moving again as soon as we can, we're never going to get the hang of this." They did the run again and suffered even more, but this time they spent three days out of commission instead of two. "Come on," Gabriel said again, and they scheduled their third run and went through with it walking as slowly and stiffly as robots. But they were learning how to work with the machines at last, how to get them into a rhythm that worked, how not to waste a moment of time. Gabriel was getting more competent with the system drive, and the third tune he flew straight into the loading portal like a beam from the plasma cannon's nose, dropped the ship in place with a certainty and speed that would have terrified him days before, tottered out, and started loading. Three quarters of an hour later he found another of the shift chiefs, a weren named Detaka, watching Enda put a last couple of small container loads into place while the loading machinery toddled off to do something else. Detaka was huge, even for a weren. Despite the slightly hunched over gait that seemed common among his species, the chief stood at least two and half meters tall, and his e-suit could not hide his thick, corded muscles. His e-suit's helmet, modified to fit his massive skull with its protruding tusks, looked almost comical, but Gabriel fixed his expression into polite seriousness. Detaka was not someone that any sane being would want to anger.
"You grow skilled," pronounced the weren around his tusks, leaning down to look at Gabriel with some curiosity. "You are Connor?" "Sunshine, yes."
"You defy what the others say of you," Detaka said, straightening up and looking toward the portal again. "You are always welcome to work with me." And he was off, heading for another portal to look out and see where the next scheduled ship was.
Enda came over to Gabriel as the last machine rolled out and the cargo hold sealed itself up. " 'What others say of you'?" she asked.
"Word must have gotten out," Gabriel said. "Well, we'll see what happens."
They made their way back to Ino, rubbing their bruised and aching limbs but pleased that they were doing as well as they now were. It was harder to tell what was going on with Enda. Either for cultural reasons or because of some personal stoicism, she was only rarely a groaner and would mostly sit and look woeful. That evening and for the next day's travel toward Ino, Gabriel again did as he routinely had been doing, dividing his time between the gunnery software, learning to use its projected-virtual 3D view around the ship, and afterward spending as many hours as he thought they could afford on the Grid, roaming among the various news resources that covered Phorcys and Ino and other matters occurring in the Thalaassa system. He also routinely checked the news of Corrivale and other parts of the Verge.
Phorcys and Ino were in each others' newscasts and "written" Grid media in a much different mode than they had been while Gabriel was still on Falada. Then, as part of his work with the ambassador, he had made it his business to keep an eye on what their planetary media were doing. Mostly they were slagging one another off. One day, for amusement's sake, Gabriel had asked the computer that was ancillary to the ship's Grid management system to do a word count on certain words that occurred in translation in both Inoan and Phorcyn news stories. The clear winners for that week were the two words translating as "vile," followed closely by "machinations," "treacherous," and "enemy." After that Gabriel had ordered the machine to prepare him a new Top Ten list each day, and he began watching that list with interest. To his amusement, when he told the ambassador about it so did she. He had also read and listened to the proceeds of the planet-wide "talkrooms," to which anyone with Grid access could
contribute. All the inhabitants were breathing virtual fire at those on the other side of the argument (and sometimes at each other, for not agreeing vehemently enough about how bad the Phorcyns or Inoans were).
Toward the beginning of the serious talks, Gabriel had become very concerned, for the frequency of all the worst words in the media had gone way up. Now, though, Gabriel asked the ship's entertainment computer to conduct a similar survey, and to his complete astonishment, it only found the word "treacherous" once. All the other words seemed to have vanished. There was now a great deal of talk from all the major commentators about "the new era of cooperation," the "improved performance" of the former enemy, the "long view," the "great strides toward closer relations." That was surprising enough. But the planets' Grid talkrooms were still full of the discussion of the best way to get rid of all those devils on the other side. Apparently the Inoan or Phorcyn on the street had yet to be convinced by what his politicians were up to. This left Gabriel shaking his head. Boy, he thought, would Delvecchio have known what to make of this.
But maybe she would have known. Either way, it seemed like some kind of good sign. Or was it? There was always the status of the talkrooms. How do you have peace, finally, if the people in whose name it is being made don't believe in it or in each other? Still, he thought, from the outside at least, the news looks slightly better than it did before.
Encouraged, Gabriel went off to check on news on other subjects that were also important to him. One of them took a lot of finding. It was buried far down, not in news native to Ino's and Phorcys's own Grids. He found it in a copy transmitted from the much bigger, older Grid at Corrivale. Down in one of the many sections devoted to shipping, there was a small section labeled FLEET MOVEMENTS-as much of an "official" announcement of its ships' whereabouts as the Concord usually made. It was normally issued for the sake of system ships that might want to hitch rides on capital ships set up for that kind of thing. Also attached to that list were some minor personnel notes, if they were thought to be germane to the movement. Here was just the one line that said: CSS Falada, out of Corrivale for Aegis, 5/9/2501, pursuant to R&R, promotions and staff reassignment, Capt. E. Dareyev. Gabriel sighed and glanced away to the next menu, telling the computer to hunt down the next reference. There she went, back to a more civilized part of the Verge, certainly to a more peaceful one. Good-bye, Elinke. There went the Falada, more to the point. If I was ever going to do any scene-of-the-crime work there, any evidence would certainly be long gone. May as well give up on that one. But the truth was that any evidence that might have helped his case was probably long gone by the time he went to trial. It would be interesting to find out how much of it had been preserved, if any at all was available, though Gabriel suspected that the only way to find out about that would be to return himself to Concord-managed space and turn himself in. Then he would discover quickly enough what the truth was … and possibly die of it. No, he thought, not just today.
That night he roamed the Grids, and the next day until they made their drop at Ino. From the field there, as he had learned to do. Gabriel called administration on Eraklion to set up their next pickup . .. … and was told there wasn't one.
His mouth dropped open. To be told there was no ore to be picked up at Ordinen was like being told there was a shortage of stars in the sky. But the person at the other end of the connection was most firm about it, if a little embarrassed. It was a grizzled, rather ill-kept woman whom Gabriel had become used to seeing on the comms any hour of day or night. She looked at him from the holodisplay and seemed to
be trying to look impassive, but she could not quite manage it. "Nothing for you, I'm afraid," she said. "What about later. Next week? Next month-" "Nothing any more," she said. "Sorry."
She shut down the communication, and Gabriel found himself sitting there and staring at the comms network's "ready" screen. Enda came up from checking the just-finished decontam on the cargo hold and gazed at him with some resignation. "No hint of why?" she said. "Not to me."
"Well," Enda said, sitting down by him in the other "sitting room" chair, "this is perhaps the only drawback of short-term contracts. If they had tried to force us out while we still had a contract in effect, we could have taken them through the local labor courts, and they would still have had to employ us." "Which strikes me as a little dangerous under the circumstances," Gabriel said. "Never mind. Someone changed their mind about us. Or had it changed for them. By whom, I wonder?"
"It will probably be very difficult to find out," Enda said. "It is your choice whether we should spend the time." She did not quite say "waste," but Gabriel caught the inference nonetheless. Gabriel sighed. "Well, at the very least," he said, "if we're being barred from work here, we're going to have to go somewhere else."
Enda nodded. "Corrivale is closest, I suppose." She tilted her head from side to side, got up, and slowly began to pace. This was something that Gabriel had never seen her do before, which he found slightly alarming. "It is strange to see such happening here, though." "Why strange?"
Enda thought a moment, then said, "It strikes me as the kind of gesture some people here might think would please the Concord, perhaps. Generally speaking, if I understand this system at all, people here are, by and large, not very sanguine about Concord presence."
"It only takes one," Gabriel replied. "Anyway, there have to be some of them who're happy that the war has stopped."
"Do there?" Enda said. "Well, it would sound like a rational response, would it not? From what you have
told me, there has been little enough rationality in this system." She paced a little more.
"Well," Gabriel said after a moment, "you could make a case that if there's something odd going on here
specifically directed at one or both of us, if we change systems it should follow us."
Enda tilted her head back and forth, looking thoughtful. "It would."
'The only problem then would be working out which of us it was directed at."
"If you were about to suggest that we separate," Enda said, "that I will not do. My money is in this ship as much as yours is. More to the point, what kind of partnership is it that disintegrates at the first sign of stress? Do you really think I would drop so readily what I 'picked up' ?"
Gabriel felt ashamed, then, and hurriedly he said, "No, of course not. I just don't want you to be in trouble too. I have no desire to damage your career prospects."
Enda laughed, just one breath. "I have no career! I am an old fraal with the itch for travel, and that is all. But I too can become stubborn when I am thwarted, like Raitiz in the old story, who bit through the tree that threatened to fall on him." She smiled. Gabriel put his eyebrows up at that. "So what did the tree do?"
"It fell on him, of course. What else, when he had bitten through it? But it was his choice, you see. Joy in life is about the perception of power, and the knowledgeable and compassionate exercise of it. That is
one of the possible morals of the story,"
"And another would be not to bite through trees?"
"It would seem wise," Enda said, "since fraal have no teeth. Not the kind that would be any good for trees anyway."
Gabriel found himself staring at her mouth, rather horrified at the discovery that even after knowing her this long, he had no idea what she had instead of teeth.
"Corrivale, then," said Enda. "Tomorrow? We will have to file a driveplan, and it will take Central over there a little while to process it-they have thousands of ships each day in and out, not like here." "Fine. We'll slingshot out, then. No use in wasting free energy," Gabriel said.
"You need not go far to find a place where you may drop into drivespace safely, if that is your concern." "Yeah, well," Gabriel said, " I don't know for sure when we're going to pass this way again. Anyway, it's polite, if nothing else. We'll go out courteously instead of dropping into drive-space somewhere busy where they would have a chance to complain."
Enda shrugged at him. While it was acknowledged as dangerous for ships to drop into drivespace too close together or too close to a massive enough star or planet (or anything else of substantial mass), generally that was as dangerous as things got, though it was certainly the pilot's prerogative to take himself well out of the way if he chose. "As for you," she said, "I suspect that you merely wish to play with the system drive." "I am starting to get good with it."
"You are," Enda said, "an apt pupil, much quicker than I was, which is a mercy on us both. But then ships were not as smart two hundred years ago as they are now. And there is also the small matter of the guns."
Gabriel had to grin at that. He was enjoying gunnery practice even more than he had suspected, even though all the firing was simulated. The "JustWadeln" gunnery management package (as the manual coyly called it) was one of Insight's more popular pieces of programming these days. It was expensive but worth it-designed specifically for beginners at the space dogfighting game and upgradeable directly over the Grid (assuming you had enough dollars handy to afford that kind of thing). It used heuristic and advanced semivirtual programming to "drape" you in a cloak of space that gave you the sense of standing on your feet and fighting your spaceborne enemies as if with guns, blades, or nets, as your own ship's weaponry dictated. Having begun there, the program slowly trained you in seeing space combat no longer in the gravity-bound paradigm of someone standing in a street, but in the gravity-free, three– dimensional idiom of intersystem and extrasystem combat. Practical as it was, it was also a lot of fun to play with, and Gabriel had been using the basic hand-to-hand and other physical combat skills taught him as a marine to evolve techniques for fighting their ship in zero-g. Once again the Delgakis turned out to have been a good buy. She was quick and responsive, spun deftly on any one of her six axes without complaining too much about it, shifted from yaw to pitch to roll and combined the three with an alacrity and force from which her gravity grids protected her inhabitants very satisfactorily. "So I like the guns," Gabriel said, fairly unrepentant. "I've caught you using them too." "And enjoying it," Enda admitted, "a little human of me, perhaps? Well, I have been among them for long enough that I suppose some traits are catching. No matter. Let us make for the outer system then and prepare to remove ourselves to Corrivale. Do you want to do the plan submission, or shall I?" "I'll take care of it," Gabriel said.
Enda wandered back off down to her quarters, and Gabriel turned back to the Grid interface, still in 3D
format, and switched it back to screen-he found it hard to handle text in depth.
Gabriel brought up the starfall-plan template, made sure it was interconnected with the ship's own
computer, and plugged in tomorrow's date, Sunshine's stardrive power constants, ship mass, and the
coordinates of the destination. The computer immediately supplied time of arrival, a spot map of how
many other ships would be likely to be in that zone at that time, and the standard request form from
Corrivale Central for final confirmation of the schedule.
"Confirm it," Gabriel said, surprised to find that his voice was shaking a little.
The confirmation flashed up. The ship's computer registered it as well and began counting down toward it, asking Gabriel whether he would like to lay in a course now. He got up to go to the piloting console for his manuals-then stopped himself and sat down again, requesting the computer to show him a map of the Thalaassa system.
It was displayed for him in the round, not to scale. Gabriel chose a long hyperbolic orbit that would take them nearly out to the orbit of the last planet. Their first starfall-his first starfall– would take place just inside that little planet's orbit. He checked the system ephemeris. Rhynchus the place was called. No inhabitants, a thin atmosphere, probably too cold to support life comfortably. Good enough. They would swing by just within visual range, then make starfall and be out of here.
Once at Corrivale, there were all kinds of things that Gabriel would do when they found work. Grid prices would be cheaper there. He wanted to start doing an in-depth background check on one Jacob Ricel. Some of his records, the most recent ones anyway, would be under Star Force seal, but his earlier ones could be dug out if the price was right. There were Grid researchers who specialized in just this kind of search, people who would know places to start where Gabriel would not. And then when he found out why Ricel had betrayed him and whom Ricel was working for, then he would go to the Concord and lay out his case. He was no murderer. Accessory to manslaughter he might be, but it had been unwitting. If he had known anything of what was going to happen, he would never have become involved. With the right evidence against Ricel, it would have to be clear to them what had happened. They would clear his name. He would re-enlist. He would …
Gabriel started fully awake again, having started to doze off in the comfortable sitting room chair. The back of his brain said to him, very clearly, Do you really think so? This is hopeless. They set you up. They went to some trouble over it, and they are not going to let you find out anything that will make a difference in the long run. The rest of your life is going to be like this. Working and working toward a chance to find something out, and the minute you start getting close, something will happen to rebuff you. Get used to it.
Gabriel sat up straight and frowned, rather astonished by the sheer rush of bitterness that filled him. Blood sugar, he thought, hoping desperately that was the problem and got up to head back to the tiny galley.
"Gabriel," Enda said, "eating again?"
"It beats the alternative," Gabriel answered, grim, and started cooking himself up a meat roll. Chapter Ten
THE NEXT MORNING was their starfall. Gabriel was up three hours early, checking his settings and checking them again. They were fine, but he could not stop checking them.
"A starfall virgin," Enda said, amused, as she came into the cockpit with her morning cup of chai. 'There is no sweeter sight. Where are we?"
She set the cup carefully aside and looked over Gabriel's shoulder at the course schematic showing in the front display. "Eight AU or so out from Thalaassa," he said. "No visual on the last planet, but it's out there."
"Will we be swinging by?"
Gabriel shook his head. "No, I changed my mind. There's nothing there, so why waste fuel?" "System control must be amused," Enda replied. "So let them be. I'm being careful," Gabriel said.
She raised her eyebrows and sat down beside him in the non-control chair. "I was looking through some of those Grid-homes and sites that you saved from last night's session," she said. "I had not noticed something about one of them, but it spurred my memory of a name, one that had struck me as strange the first time I heard of it." "Oh?"
" 'Falada.' You did not tell me that your ship was named after a horse." "What?"
"But it is true. See here." Enda reached out and changed the view in the control-panel tank to echo that of the one in the sitting room, so that text scrolled by, and Gabriel had to squint a little to get the sense of it. "It is a strange tale from the Solar Union somewhere. A young girl of noble birth is cast out of her home. She takes her 'horse,' a beast that talks and gives her advice. She disguises herself and takes service with strangers. After some odd occurrences, the horse is killed. The girl asks that the horse's head be nailed up over an archway under which she passes each day while doing some job of menial work. When she passes, the head of the horse speaks wisdom to her still. It seems to recite a great deal of poetry," Enda added, sounding impressed by this.
"Where did you get that?" Gabriel asked, leaning closer to the screen. "No, it's just a coincidence. Falada is just the weren word for 'wildfire.'"
"Yet how strange," Enda said, reaching out into the tank to "touch" it and stop the scrolling. "There is a story rather like this among the fraal about the Lost Wanderer who goes apart from her own-" "And I'm the horse?" Gabriel said and grinned.
Enda looked at him with an amused look in those huge, burning blue eyes. "Considering the way you eat-"
Then they both jumped practically out of their skins, for the ship's proximity alarm, a dreadful screeching howl that not even a corpse could have ignored, went off right above their heads. Enda plunged out of the cockpit toward the racks where their e-suits were kept. Gabriel switched the tank into detection mode again and scanned it frantically while bringing up the Just-Wadeln routine. It took only moments for that to load, but right now they seemed like far too many moments. The alarm was shrilling louder, indicating that the incoming craft were accelerating. "Don't just sit there; give me tactical!" Gabriel nearly shouted at the console, then breathed, breathed again, tried to get a grip on himself.
The fighting software's management implementation draped itself around him. Gabriel did not understand the physics of the implementation and did not care to. As far as he was concerned, every citizen of Insight was some kind of mad genius and worth every penny they were paid if they could do for you what the system was presently doing-make space look like something you could walk on, move around in comfortably, get used to. Courtesy of his marine training, Gabriel was at least far enough along in this particular mastery that he did not need to have a virtual "floor" to work on, though the system defaulted to one angled to match the given solar system's ecliptic. He got rid of the "floor" and saw who was coming. There were three ships. They all glowed red, the system's indicator that they had weapons cast loose. The ships were coming at him one above, two below, more or less-deceptive as it always was to use such terms in space-and they were corkscrewing as they came. Gabriel wasted no time in casting his weapons loose as well. One after another the ports reported open, and the indicators in the tank for each gun's preheat cycle came up, shading up as the seconds went by from blue through violet, heading for red themselves. Sunshine was well armed as cargo ships went: one gun on each major axis and two forward, all of them plasma-cartridge ejectors with self-feed and self– clean. This was where a lot of Enda's "defense budget" had gone, but not all. The ace in Sunshine's pocket, the gun that Gabriel would not heat until the last moment to avoid betraying its presence, was the 120 mm rail cannon mounted longitudinally on the ship's "roof."
"Okay," Gabriel whispered as the three ships came in. They had not hailed him, and he was not going to bother hailing them-their intentions seemed plain enough. He shrugged his shoulders, feeling space "fit more closely" around him as the program came up to speed. He drew his sidearms. The program let him think he had only two, for convenience's sake, and it had no problem maintaining the illusion since all six of the plasma cartridge guns had nearly one-hundred-eighty-degree traverse mountings. Gabriel was dimly aware of Enda hurrying in suited, with Gabriel's e-suit in her arms. "No time for that now," he muttered.
"Get strapped in." In his chair, despite the straps, he did his best to curl into a marine's preferred position for zero-g combat, a bolus: arms wrapped around knees so that opposite and equal muscle movement from any side would push or tumble him hard in the other direction. The program read his intention and fed it to the ship, which tumbled toward the intruders.
Two of them split away toward either side, firing. Lasers, Gabriel thought, not great. But maybe only what they choose to start with. The first impacts came, and the sensors in the ship's cerametal hide read them and fed them to the fighting program as a low moan. Nothing too serious. The CM armor had ablated the beams. Gabriel spun the ship to follow them, looking to the tactical system to handle targeting. It was too dark out here for routine visual, and the ships were small. Their shapes were a little unusual. Each of them was scarcely more than a little spherical bullet with no cockpits, at least none with visible windows. Running entirely on sensors, Gabriel thought. Odd, but he filed that information for later if he needed it.
He flung his arms and legs out to stop his spin and fired. The ship spun, answering, and the two side and forward projectile cannons each ignited its chemical load and blasted it out as plasma with a timed explosive core. At short ranges the weapon could be deadly effective if you got a hit. The problem was that in vacuum and microgravity the projectile's trajectory was perfectly flat, as much so as if it had been a laser or light beam itself, and it could bend no more than they could. This meant taking "windage" with every shot, using what data the computer could glean from the local situation to have the shot turn up where your target would turn up in the next second or so. Once there the plasma cartridge underwent its deadly secondary ignition and blew the hell out of anything with which it had come into contact. This time the computer hadn't had time to construct an effective enough firing solution. Both projectiles missed and all three ships, now past Gabriel, arced around hard for another pass, all firing together. He could feel Enda slipping the cloak of space around her now as she settled into the number two seat. The hull moaned again, more loudly this time, as the three ships swept past and lasered the Sunshine in several spots. Again no result, he heard Enda "say" into the program, the "artificial telepathy" feature of the software making it sound as if the words were originating inside his head where noise or the lack of it could not interfere. But I think they may have something better. Could be. But so do we. Not yet, Gabriel!
Of course not. The ships were coming in close together, much closer than they should have and still firing. Gabriel picked one, let the computer know it, gave it a good couple of seconds for calculation purposes, and just as the front guns' lights went ready again the computer found an interim solution. Gabriel fired again. The projectiles leaped out, the tracks of plasma blinding even in virtual experience. They streaked away, briefly blotting out even the tactical image of the attacking craft­-then bloomed into fire. Metal shattered outward, air sprayed silvery into space and froze. Then it was all dark again.
The two other craft immediately broke right and left, one high, one low. The left one, said Enda as she fired.
The right-hand craft fired as well, and this time not just a laser. He's got canister too, Gabriel said, as the program spread all kinds of warnings over his field of vision. Solution says the cargo bay. He felt Enda nod. There was nothing they could do about it. The augmented shielding back there might do some good or it might not. Wham!-and the whole ship shook, the hull screaming in their ears through the program. Holed, Gabriel said. Shit, shit, shit!
Enda said, It is a nuisance; that was a particularly good price on the modular shielding. She fired at the left-hand ship as it swept near and past her.
The computer yelled with delight at the look of what seemed a perfect solution. The projectile screamed away, hit it-